When to Use Dialogflow vs. Actions Builder?
With both Dialogflow and Actions Builder, you can build conversations for the Google Assistant. The main reason for choosing Dialogflow Essentials over Actions Builder is because Dialogflow ES is part of Google Cloud and comes with enterprise terms & conditions, SLA’s and support. When you want to build multi-channel virtual agents (bots that support Google Assistant and or social media chatbots), then Dialogflow Essentials is the tool you want to pick. Dialogflow ES has direct integration with the Actions on Google framework. Dialogflow is a mature tool, largely used by the community.
Actions Builder works best for simple use cases that let users get things done quickly. It has consumer terms and conditions.
About the Author
Lee Boonstra is an AI Software Engineer & Advocate in the Google Cloud Office of the CTO (Applied Innovation Factory). They specialize in secure multi-agent systems, frontier LLMs, and voice technology. Lee is the author of reference books for O'Reilly and Apress, and the viral Kaggle/Google Prompt Engineering whitepaper.