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I'm developing an Action, let's call it "foo". It's a grocery list, so users should be able to explicitly invoke it like so:

  • "ask foo to add milk" (fails)
  • "ask foo add milk" (works, but grammatically awful)
  • "tell foo add milk" (fails, even though it's basically identical to the above?)
  • "talk to foo" ... "add milk" (works, but awkward)

I've defined "add {item} to my foo list" and "add {item}" (as well as many others) as training phrases in Dialogflow. So it seems like everything should be configured correctly.

The explicit invocations "talk to foo" (wait) "add milk" and "ask foo add milk" work fine, but I cannot get any others to work in the Actions simulator or on an actual device. In all cases it returns "Sorry, this action is not available in simulation". When I test in Dialogflow, it works fine.

It seems like the Assistant is trying to match some other unrelated skill (I'm assuming that's what that debug error means). But why would it fail when I explicitly invoke "ask foo to add milk"?

Additionally, my action name is already pretty unique, but even if I change it to something really unique ("buffalo bananas", "painter oscar", whatever) it still doesn't match my action. Which leads me to think that I'm not understanding something, or Actions is just really broken.

Can anyone help me debug this?

Edit: I spent weeks in conversation with the Actions support team, and they determined it was a "problem with my account", but didn't know how to fix it. Unfortunately, at that point they simply punted me to GSuite support, who of course know nothing about Actions and also couldn't help. I'm all out of luck and ideas at this point.

Dane Powell
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1 Answers1

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Implicit invocation is not based directly on what training phrases you have. Google will try to match users to the best action for a given query, but it might not.

To get explicit invocation with an invocation phrase, you may need to go back to the Dialogflow integrations section and configure each intent you want to serve as an implicit intent.

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Nick Felker
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  • Thanks, but I had already configured the Google Assistant to use the "add item" intent as an implicit invocation. If I explicitly say "ask foo to do something", is Google really going to treat that like an implicit invocation and possibly send me to a completely unrelated app? Is the implication then that I need a more unique training phrase? – Dane Powell Mar 10 '19 at 19:44
  • Also I just discovered something else odd, if I use the explicit invocation "ask foo add milk" it works fine, but if I use "ask foo _to_ add milk" it fails. – Dane Powell Mar 10 '19 at 20:11