JESSICA DENE EARLEY-CHA: Hi.
Welcome to "Assistant on Air," where
we have conversations with people
who build for Google Assistant.
I'm Jessica, and I'll be your host today.
I'm a Developer Advocate for Actions on Google,
and I'll be chatting with Sachin today, who
is a Google Developer Expert for Google Assistant.
And we'll be chatting about enriching conversation actions
by using various APIs.
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There you go.
Welcome, Sachin.
Thank you so much for hanging out with us.
SACHIN KUMAR: Thanks, Jessica.
Thanks for having me.
JESSICA DENE EARLEY-CHA: So tell us a little about yourself.
SACHIN KUMAR: I'm a Google Developer Expert.
I also head the Google Developer groups in Doha.
I'm the Chief Technology Officer at TupeloLife,
which is a connected health care company based out
of Dallas, Texas.
I'm an active mentor for a lot of startups in the region,
and I do a lot of talks and workshops.
JESSICA DENE EARLEY-CHA: Oh my gosh, that's a lot of things
that you're doing, a lot of hats that you're wearing.
But I would love to dig into the workshops.
What type of workshops you do?
SACHIN KUMAR: So typically in terms of the conversations
and workshops that I handle, I try
to keep it from the basics and the beginnings
to how to build your own actions from scratch
and then from there, we kind of take it
to the next level by kind of combining
the various APIs that's available to build
meaningful products and actions.
JESSICA DENE EARLEY-CHA: That's amazing.
So you start off with just, I'm sure
explaining what is Actions on Google and voice conversations,
which is a hard topic.
And then you expand that to include other APIs to enrich
your actions it sounds like.
SACHIN KUMAR: Exactly.
Yeah.
JESSICA DENE EARLEY-CHA: Can you me
example of what you do, what you teach?
SACHIN KUMAR: So in terms of one of the most
fascinating and interesting projects
of workshops that I've done is how
to build chat bots of voice assistants using machine
learning APIs.
And as part of that machine learning APIs,
Google Cloud provides machine learning
APIs in terms of vision, natural language,
as well as we do intelligence and more.
And as part of this, I kind of started
experimenting with how we can leverage these APIs directly
with conversations to build more meaningful stuff.
So one of the things that kind of stood out
was the Natural Language API.
JESSICA DENE EARLEY-CHA: Makes sense, yes.
SACHIN KUMAR: And within that, we
had sentiment analysis and entity analysis.
So sentiment analysis was basically more
of how to kind of understand your user based
on the overall attitude, being whether the sentiment was
positive or negative.
So then I thought, OK, that's a pretty cool way
to actually understand something,
understand your user.
So the API is a standalone API that's statically out there.
So why not just integrate with actions
where you're having conversations
and understand your user better?
JESSICA DENE EARLEY-CHA: Oh my god, that just
sounds like it just opens up a lot more of your understanding
of the user.
And I also hear whispers that you've
been playing with another tool that we recently launched,
Interactive Canvas.
So can you tell me a bit about that?
SACHIN KUMAR: So this is one of the most interesting things
in respect to the Assistant, which
is the Interactive Canvas.
So Interactive Canvas allows you to leverage the web
and take the entire power of the web,
like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, which most
of the developers, you know--
JESSICA DENE EARLEY-CHA: Yeah, we're familiar with.
Oh, totally.
SACHIN KUMAR: Yeah, we're very familiar with.
With that, and then kind of integrate with conversation.
So now, rather than just having a conversation response back
where you hear audio, you also have a visual display
where you're kind of interacting with the display, as well.
And it's voice-driven.
So that's pretty cool.
I feel like this is like the next level of gaming
to some extent, because people are used to gaming
on mobile phones, consoles.
But here you you're actually playing
a game based on your voice, just by having a conversation.
That's pretty cool.
JESSICA DENE EARLEY-CHA: Yeah, and I'm
sure you can't just grab a website and just
put it into a smart display.
There most likely are going to be different elements
to consider, because it's voice first.
So you noticed anything that have done differently
when you've been building out some Interactive Canvas?
SACHIN KUMAR: The approach that I
took to build a simple educational game was to kind
of not use the traditional forms, or buttons,
and stuff like that, because here it's a game
so the display acts as a secondary layer, where
it kind of gives you visual cues on where the game is
or how to interact with it.
But rather, the entire thing is driven by voice.
So took out the entire play and where you
design your conversation first.
JESSICA DENE EARLEY-CHA: Always.
SACHIN KUMAR: Yeah, that's very important.
And after designing your conversations,
use the fulfillment where your back-end logic is there.
And within the back-end logic, that's
where you use the Interactive Canvas API.
JESSICA DENE EARLEY-CHA: Sachin, thank you so
much for hanging out with us.
SACHIN KUMAR: Thank you so much.
JESSICA DENE EARLEY-CHA: If someone's watching this right
now, and they're like, I really want to get
started, because this sounds great,
what would you recommend for them to do first?
SACHIN KUMAR: So I would typically say, first
go to Actions on Google.
And also, follow the Codelabs.
There's three Codelabs right now.
And go through all the three Codelabs.
By just following those Codelabs,
you will be done with how to build actions from scratch
to building different features.
So once you're done with the Codelabs,
the next step would be to go to Google Cloud,
explore the machine learning APIs,
and especially the natural language API.
It's a simple API call, trust API.
You get the conversations from into your back-end.
Call the API.
You get the response back.
Send it back through your APIs, it's and it's done.
JESSICA DENE EARLEY-CHA: Thank you so
much for hanging out with us.
Really appreciate it.
SACHIN KUMAR: Thanks a lot, Jessica.
Thanks for having me.
JESSICA DENE EARLEY-CHA: We hope that you liked today's show.
If you want to hear the full episode,
check out the "Assistant on Air" podcast
on your favorite podcast platform.
I've been Jessica, chat with you next time.
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