Continuing on my quest to see all clunky, hierarchical IVRs die, I have been experimenting with Dialogflow's new Phone Gateway and Knowledge Connectors that were recently introduced. The Knowledge Connector extracts data out of a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document and makes it available for the bot to use in its responses. The Phone Gateway includes lets you connect any Dialogflow bot to a phone line. Together, these two features make it relatively simple to build a voicebot replacement to a informational IVR with the added bonus that the bot can be reused on other media too.
In this post I review of Dialogflow's new phone gateway and knowledge connector features. Then I provide a walkthrough on how to use them to build a conversational voicebot IVR in minutes.