A day after introducing new developer tools for its popular voice assistant, Google LLC has launched a cloud service that will enable companies to build their own conversational apps.

Released into public beta this morning, Dialogflow Enterprise is based on technology that the search giant obtained through the acquisition of API.AI Inc. last year. The service makes it possible to create a virtual assistant without having to build from scratch the complex machine learning technology such projects require.

Instead, developers can use relatively simple controls to customize a bot’s behavior. If a virtual assistant is expected to provide, say, flight times, Dialogflow Enterprise would require a few examples of how users might request such information. The algorithms under the hood can automatically interpret the intent of inquiries, as well as carry out tasks such as placing an order.

These are the core capabilities that Google made available when it started offering an initial free version of Dialogflow last month. The new Enterprise Edition expands upon this feature set in two big ways.

The first is the addition of native voice support. Thanks to the upgrade, companies can build bots that respond to verbal commands similarly to Google Assistant without relying on an external speech recognition service. Besides simplifying development, the fact that voice input doesn’t have to be sent elsewhere for processing reportedly also improves performance by about 30 percent.

The other enhancement is that Dialogflow Enterprise comes with the add-ons many companies require for important application projects. Specifically, customers can purchase technical support plans and will soon also have access to service-level agreements guaranteeing infrastructure availability.

Dialogflow Enterprise is priced at 0.2 cents per text interaction and 0.65 cents per voice interaction. The new support for verbal commands is available in the free edition too, but with restrictions on the number of requests that an application can make.

In conjunction with the launch of Dialogflow Enterprise, Google has opened public access to a complementary bot analytics dashboard called Chatbase. The free service can give developers insight into how users interact with a virtual assistant and the accuracy of its responses.

Image: Google