Using "speechBiasingHints" with Dialogflow Webhook

Question

First time posting, so feel free to give me feedback if I could improve something about this post... Now on to my question.

I am currently developing a Google Action, the Action will allow the user to define important events, such as Bob's Birthday or Fred's Graduation, and save data about said events. Later, the user will be able to ask for info about the event and get it returned back to them.

I am using the Dialogflow API with "Inline Editor" fulfillment to keep it as simple as possible for right now. The problem I am running into is this, the event has an entity type of @sys.any, so anything the user says is excepted as valid input. I would like some way to bias towards events I already have stored for the user however, so that they are more likely to find the event they are looking for.

I found another answer on here discussing speech biasing (What is meant by speech bias and how to use speechBiasHints in google-actions appResponse) which defined speech biasing as the ability to"influence the speech to text recognition," which is exactly what I believe I want. While that answer provided sample code, it was for the Actions SDK, not the Dialogflow SDK, which I am using.

Can anyone provide an example of how to fill the "speechBiasingHints" section of the ExpectedInput response of the Conversation Webhook using the DialogFlow Webkook?

Note: This is for a student project, and I'm new to developing Google Actions and still very much learning about everything that is capable with Google Actions. Any feedback or suggestions are very welcome.

Answer 1

The question you link to does quite a few things differently than the approach you're taking. The Action SDK provides more low-level control, but doesn't have much Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities, which Dialogflow provides.

Dialogflow handles biasing a little differently through the use of Entities, so you don't need to control the speech biasing directly, Dialogflow can handle that for you, to some extent.

Since each user may have a different event name, you'll probably want to use a User Entity, which is an entity you define and then populate on a user-by-user basis through Dialogflow's API. In your sample phrases, you can then use this entity name instead of @sys:any, or create another set of phrases that use this entity in addition.