How to Integrate Dialogflow Chatbot with AngularJS [Step-By-Step Guide]

There are numerous posts about developing a chatbot using Dialogflow. But creating chatbot isn’t enough. Connecting Dialogflow to the web interface is even more interesting and challenging. With Angular being a popular and emerging platform, here is our guide to integrate Dialogflow chatbot with Angular JS.

In our quest to simplify chatbot integration with different platforms, we have previously written guides to integrate chatbots with websites and apps.

Pre-requisites

To get started, you would need a Dialogflow chatbot or working knowledge of Dialogflow and Angular JS. To integrate the chatbots with Angular, you will need a Kommunicate account. All the aforementioned tools have free to try out.

Steps to integrate Dialogflow chatbot with Angular JS

I am going to explain how I connected Dialogflow and Angular with the help of Kommunicate.

Note: To keep it very simple and straight this tutorial explains with really basic and plain code development. Also to mention this project can be found on my Github. To get an in detail tutorial on how to integrate the bot into a website you can check here.

Step 1: Create your Dialogflow chatbot

To get started, you can easily create a chatbot in Dialogflow or edit one of their provided sample chatbot templates. To go further, you can create your own Intents & Entities.

Step 2: Integrate Dialogflow chatbot with Kommunicate

Login to your Kommunicate dashboard and navigate to the Bot section. If you do not have an account, you can create one here. Locate the Dialogflow section and click on Settings.

Now, navigate to your Dialogflow console and download the service account key file. Here are the steps to locate the file:

Select your Agent from the dropdown in the left panel.Click on setting button. It will open a setting page for the agent.Inside general tab search for GOOGLE PROJECTS and click on your service account.After getting redirected to your SERVICE ACCOUNT, create a key in JSON format for your project from the actions section and it will get automatically downloaded.Now upload the key file.

If you are using V1 APIs, just copy your client and developer token from Dialogflow console and paste in the fields provided. Click on Save and Proceed.

Setup your bot’s name and profile picture and choose whether to allow the bot to human handoff for your newly created bot. Click Finish bot integration setup and voila, your bot is now integrated.

You can check/edit your integrated bot using the below path:

Dashboard →Bot Integration → Manage Bots: You can check all your integrated bots here.

Dashboard → Bot Integration. Once finished, your Dialogflow section will have a green icon with the number of bots are you have successfully integrated.

Step3: Install the Angular CLI globally.

To install the CLI using npm, open a terminal/command prompt and enter the following command:

npm install -g @angular/cli

Now, create a new workspace and initial app project. Run the CLI command ng new and provide the name my-app, as shown here:

ng new my-app

The initial app project contains a simple Welcome app, which is ready to run. Angular includes a server so that you can easily build and serve your app locally.

Now, navigate to the workspace folder (my-app).

Launch the server by using the CLI command ng serve, with the –open option.

cd my-app
ng serve --open

Step 4: Installing chatbot in the Angular component

Install chatbot on the angular component. The CLI will create the first Angular component. It is the root component and is named app-root.

Run any code editor and open workspace folder (my-app).

Note: Components are the fundamental building blocks of Angular applications. They display data on the screen, listen for user input, and take action based on that input.

@Component({
  selector: 'app-root',
  templateUrl: './app.component.html',
  styleUrls: ['./app.component.css']
})
export class AppComponent {
  title = 'My First Angular App!';
}

To install the chatbot, open Kommunicate and navigate to Dashboard →Settings. Click on Install under the Configuration section. Copy the JavaScript code to be added either in your website or your application.

Paste the javascript code into the app.component.ts file. The code of the component should look like this

@Component({
  selector: 'app-root',
  templateUrl: './app.component.html',
  styleUrls: ['./app.component.scss']
})
export class AppComponent {
  title = 'my first app';
  ngOnInit() {
    (function(d, m){
      var kommunicateSettings = {"appId":<YOUR_APP_ID>,"conversationTitle":<CONVERSATION_TITLE>};
      var s = document.createElement("script"); s.type = "text/javascript"; s.async = true;
      s.src = "https://api.kommunicate.io/v2/kommunicate.app";
      var h = document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0]; h.appendChild(s);
      (window as any).kommunicate = m; m._globals = kommunicateSettings;
    })(document, (window as any).kommunicate || {});
  }
}

The ng serve command launches the server, watches your files and rebuilds the app as you make changes to those files.

The –open (or just -o) option automatically opens your browser to http://localhost:4200/.

If you run the browser, you should see a chat widget screen pop up and that means your chatbot is ready. This is how you integrate Dialogflow chatbot with Angular using Kommunicate in few simple steps.

This article was originally published here