Google LLC is combining its Hangouts Chat communications tool today with its natural language understanding service Dialogflow to help developers build more conversational chatbots that can be integrated with outside applications.

Google introduced Hangouts Chat last year as a rival to Slack and Microsoft Teams. It tried to differentiate the offering by pairing it with its ecosystem of application programming interfaces. The idea was that developers could also use the service to automate certain customer services tasks through chatbots.

Meanwhile, Dialogflow is a cloud-based service used to create those virtual assistants without having to build the complex machine learning they require from scratch.

By combining the two services, Google said, it’s offering developers a “new way to easily build rich, natural conversational experiences.” Features include the ability to add new training phrases and responses, and pass data to other applications and services, Google said.

“With Dialogflow, you can create a natural-sounding conversational UI with just a few clicks,” Google Cloud product manager Jon Harmer wrote in a blog post. “Because Dialogflow includes built-in Natural Language Understanding (NLU), your bot can quickly understand and respond to user messages.”

The newly integrated services can also be used with Hubot, which is an outside automation tool created by GitHub Inc. that can sync with other chat services. Harmer said Google is making available a “Hangouts Chat Hubot Adapter” for developers to build chatbots that work on multiple platforms, so their creations aren’t limited only to Hangouts.

In addition, Google is building a catalog of pre-built chatbots in Hangouts available for developers to use. The catalog will provide both screenshots and detailed descriptions of each chatbot service when it comes online in the coming months, Google said.

Both the Dialogflow integration for Hangouts Chat and the Hubot adapter are available now.

Image: mohamed hassan/Pixabay