If you are looking for quick, out-of-the-box speech to text functionality – then we have news for you! At api.ai, we understand that sometimes you don’t want to create everything from scratch and we have the full voice interface solution.
Through the half a decade that we spent creating our nlp engine, we have also created many significant knowledge domains to support interaction within the Assistant. For your convenience, we are releasing these Domain Knowledge Bases into api.ai
Domains are pre-defined knowledge packages. By enabling Domains on the appropriately named tab in the dev console, you can make your agent understand thousands of diverse requests – no coding or thinking required! This week we have released Domains for: Smart Home, Maps and Points of Interest, Booking, Media, Times and Dates, Web Browsing, Small Talk, Apps, and Device Control. Of course, more will be coming soon.
So, what does that mean?
Now, user’s requests are sent for processing to both your agent and the Domains Knowledge Base. For ease of development, you will see both results in the api.ai test console. In the runtime, your agent has a preference. If a request is made via the HTTP API or one of the SDK helpers, api.ai will return the agent’s response if available. If not, a Domain response will be returned.
If your app requires more commands to be processed within certain Domains, you can create your own intents in addition to what is available. [Note: You need to use the same name for the parameters to be consistent with the parameters returned from the Domains].
This means that you could create an empty agent, and as long as Domains are turned on it will understand all sorts of things (e.g. “I want to hear the Red Hot Chili Peppers”, “Lock the front door at 9 pm”, “Book me a hotel for 2 nights in San Francisco”, “Wake me up at 7:30 am”, “I want a hot dog”, “I want to go to a concert tomorrow”).
For more information, check out our Domains documentation here.
