Google Dialogflow

Dialogflow is Google Cloud's conversational agent platform, with Dialogflow CX as the advanced edition for complex agents and Dialogflow ES as the earlier standard edition, used to build chat and voice agents that run on Google's infrastructure.

Session-based billing is what makes Dialogflow economically different from the independent agent platforms. A session is a conversation between an end user and an agent, chat or voice or mixed, and is billed per session at published Google Cloud rates rather than through a platform subscription. That means a low-traffic agent costs almost nothing and a high-traffic one scales linearly, with no seat count or contract negotiation in between. Voice sessions have their own overage arrangement past a duration threshold.

Dialogflow CX exists because the earlier ES model struggled with complex agents. ES organised conversations around intents and contexts, which works for a bounded FAQ agent and becomes very hard to reason about once a conversation has many stages and conditional paths. CX introduced explicit flows and pages, making the state of a conversation something a designer can see rather than infer.

Being inside Google Cloud brings the usual advantages: identity and access management, logging, regional deployment and direct access to Google's speech and language services in the same project. Google has been folding these capabilities into its newer Gemini Enterprise Customer Experience Agent Studio branding, though Dialogflow CX retains its own documentation and product identity. Documentation is published in more than a dozen languages.