Dialogflow Migration V2 Guide [Part 1]

***UPDATE***

Dialogflow have extended the V1 API shutdown deadline to March 31st, 2020. https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow/docs/release-notes#November_14_2019

 

Winter is coming! (for any Game of Thrones fans this will make perfect sense!) In October last year, we wrote about the news that Google will be dropping support for V1 of the Dialogflow REST API in Oct 2019. We've been building all our chatbots with V2 since last year, however, there are many companies who still have V1 Dialogflow agents which will need to be transferred. This blog post aims to help you with carrying out your migration successfully.

The amount of work needed will really depend on what features your Dialogflow agent is using and where it's integrated:  If you are using Dialogflow's fulfillment webhook, inline editor, or any Dialogflow API, you'll need to update your code, endpoints, and/or fulfillment to be compatible with V2. However If you are certain your existing agent doesn't use the fulfillment webhook library, the Dialogflow API, or any integrations, then you will not need to make any major changes before selecting V2.
Due to authentication changes, the biggest impact will be for Dialogflow web agent implementations which are currently calling the REST API.

This post will be split this 2 sections: a basic migration guide for agents not using the REST API and a more advanced version covering what changes are needed to use the new REST API and what changes need to be made to support authentication.

You can see more details about upgrading from V1 to V2 in the official guide here.

 

Basic Migration

 

Anyone who already has built out their website chatbots using v1 API, then they should start planning for the migration sooner rather than later. Any new features should be added after the upgrade. The migration is potentially a non-trivial task, considering some chatbots have some fairly complex code driving their fulfilment. If you have a live bot in production our advice is to set up an upgrade chatbot as a copy of your existing bot project and then work through the upgrade there. You can guarantee that changing to V2 will mean that fulfilment and API calls may stop working. Once the upgrade is complete re-testing all bot functionality is strongly advised before setting live.

Chatbot Web Interfaces

We would recommend everyone who is creating custom website chatbots to do so using the v2 API. All our new chatbots are built using the v2API.

 

If you need assistance or advice with your own chatbot v2 upgrade please get in touch, we are Dialogflow experts and would be happy to help!