Hi,

Once we have an agent created, if we are interested in the Google Assistant market, we will need to publish it in the Actions on Google platform, what will make it available to all the Google Assistant enabled devices out there: phones, smart speakers, televisions, … washing machines ?!?!?! 😀

To access the console you need to use this URL: console.actions.google.com

And you will get a screen like this one:

I won’t cover the standard procedure to register an action; it is available in this page::

developers.google.com/actions/dialogflow/submit

But I think it is relevant to highlight a few things. After submitting an action to production, it will go through a validation procedure that takes several days, as it will be checked to have proper quality, doing what the developer said the actions was doing, the best practices are followed to interact with the user, there is no inappropriate content, and so on.

This is checked again every time you update your action to a new version in production, so to develop fast and efficiently you have to work with restricted access versions, up to 20 users in Alpha, and up to 200 in Beta, that you will add using their emails, so only those registered users will have access to the agent in their devices.

For example, in my “Martinez Hotels” demo, I have my private gmail address as tester, so my Google Home at home is able to respond to “Talk to Martinez Hotels”, while the rest of the world is not aware of my hotel holding.

To do this there is a non evident step; once you add a new address as tester, you have to send the user a link to opt-in the testing. You can see this link in the Alpha or Beta deployment window, like in this example:

The problem is that each time you enter a new email, it takes a couple of hours to have this link working for this particular user. Once it is working, if he/she opens the link y a phone, with his/her assistant registered under the same account, it will show the information about the new agent, and scrolling down he/she can choose to be part of the testing:

With this we can easily add users to test our agent as many times as needed. It is a simple procedure, but some lack of understanding from my side, and the delay in having the link working, have made me loose a lot of time. I hope you can now make it straight forward

Regards,

Jamarmu

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I work for Google Cloud, but this post are personal ideas and opinions