Playbooks

A playbook is the basic building block of generative agents. A generative agent typically has many playbooks, where each playbook is defined to handle specific tasks. The playbook data is provided to the LLM, so it has the information it needs to answer questions and execute tasks. Each playbook can provide information, send queries to external services, or defer conversation handling to a flow or another playbook to handle sub-tasks.

Limitations

The following limitations apply:

• Agents that use playbooks don't support sending a call companion SMS from the Default Welcome Intent route in the Default Start Flow, but you can enable the call companion SMS option in standard flows.
• The Agent Builder console does not support flows.
• Generative agents created in the Agent Builder console don't open in the Dialogflow CX console, unless the project is granted access to the restricted access feature in the Dialogflow CX console. To request access, contact your Google account team.

Language support

Playbooks support the same languages as Gemini models.

Region support

Playbooks are supported in the following regions:

• global
• asia-south1
• asia-southeast1
• asia-northeast1
• australia-southeast1
• eu (multi-region)
• europe-west1
• europe-west2
• europe-west3
• northamerica-northeast1
• us (multi-region)
• us-central1
• us-east1
• us-west1

Playbook data

A playbook is composed of the following data:

• Playbook name: a concise name in natural language that helps developers and the LLM to understand what tasks the playbook handles
• Goals: high level description of what the playbook should accomplish
• Instructions: defines the process steps that should be taken to accomplish the goal
• Examples: sample conversations that are effectively few-shot prompt examples for the LLM
• Parameters: are used to store information about a conversation like user input, user system information, results of actions, and so on.

Default playbook

When you create a generative agent using Agent Builder console, a default playbook is created automatically.

The default playbook is the starting point for conversations, so it has some important distinctions from other playbooks:

• The default playbook doesn't receive a summary of preceding conversation turns.
• The default playbook can't define or receive input parameters.

Agent Builder console agents vs Dialogflow CX console agents

Some projects have been granted access to the playbook restricted access feature in the Dialogflow CX console. The following table describes the currently supported playbook features for each console:

Capability	Dialogflow CX console	Agent Builder console
Release stage	Private GA	Public Preview
Flows	✅
Input/output parameters for agents	✅
Function tools	✅ (not supported in simulator)	✅
Save simulator and conversation history as example		✅
Custom prompts for data store query rewrite and summarization	✅
Test cases	✅
Import and export	✅
VPC SC	Webhooks ✅	Open API Tools ✅
Security and compliance	CMEK, AxT, DRZ	CMEK, AxT, DRZ