I’m trying to set up a connection between my DialogFlow CX agent and a Vertex AI agent (previously known as playbook) but I’m running into some issues.
I watched a Google tutorial that showed how to create this routing setup. The process they demonstrated was:
Navigate to the Start Page in the Building an Agent section
Click on Routes
Open Transitions and choose the playbooks option
But when I follow these same steps in my own project, I can’t find the Playbooks selection in the Transitions menu. The option just isn’t there for some reason.
Has anyone else encountered this problem? Maybe there’s a different way to set up this routing now, or perhaps I’m missing a configuration step? I’d really appreciate any guidance on how to properly link these two services together.
This sounds like you might be dealing with the recent interface changes Google rolled out. I ran into something similar about six weeks ago and discovered that the routing configuration has been moved around quite a bit. First thing to verify is whether your project actually has Vertex AI Agent Builder enabled at the organizational level. Sometimes the APIs show as enabled but there are additional enterprise features that need to be activated separately through your Google Cloud admin. Another possibility is that you’re looking in the wrong flow state. The playbooks routing option only appears when you’re configuring certain types of flows, not all of them. Try creating a new flow specifically designated for external integrations and see if the option shows up there. I also noticed that some regions don’t have full feature parity yet. If you’re working in a newer region, consider temporarily switching to us-central1 or europe-west1 to test if the functionality appears. You can always migrate back once everything is working properly.
I encountered this same frustration about three months ago during a client project. The issue turned out to be related to billing configuration rather than permissions in my case. Google requires enhanced billing to be set up for Vertex AI integrations, and without it the playbooks option simply won’t appear in the interface. Check your billing account settings and ensure you have committed spend or enterprise billing enabled. Standard pay-as-you-go accounts sometimes don’t expose all the integration features. Another gotcha I discovered is that the Dialogflow CX agent needs to be created with specific agent settings enabled from the beginning. If you created your agent before enabling Vertex AI services, you might need to recreate it entirely. There’s some backend provisioning that happens during agent creation that can’t be retroactively added. I ended up having to delete my original agent and rebuild it after getting all the prerequisites sorted out. Not ideal but it resolved the missing playbooks option immediately.
Had this exact issue last month when setting up a similar integration. The playbooks option disappeared from the UI after Google updated the console.
What worked for me was checking the project permissions first. You need the Vertex AI Agent Builder API enabled in your project. Go to the API library and make sure it’s active.
Also, your service account needs the right roles. I had to add “Vertex AI Administrator” and “Dialogflow API Admin” to get the playbooks option to show up.
If that doesn’t work, try switching to the new Agents tab in the Google Cloud Console instead of the old Dialogflow CX interface. The routing options are sometimes in different places depending on which UI you’re using.
One more thing - make sure your Vertex AI agent is in the same region as your Dialogflow CX agent. I wasted hours debugging this before realizing they were in different zones.