Building a Chatbot with IBM Watson
Over the last three weeks, I’ve been working with a fintech company who want to upgrade their technology.
As part of my role, I look at new and innovative technology to enable frictionless experiences for our customers. The team is small and are getting inundated with basic inquiry that can really be found on their websites and while this touch can be an initial touch-point, in order to scale and grow, we need to look at alternatives than manned-chat.
I looked at a range of chat frameworks from Wit.ai, Api.ai, Facebook and Pandorabots, however I needed something that’s more out of the box and already enabled with the basics to get up and running without a lot of backend development. They use a wordpress website so I needed something that could be deployed easily without us needing to build a plugin.
What I chose: IBM Watson Conversation.
I’m not the biggest IBM guy, but their Watson framework is quite strong for getting something up and running in about a day or two with refinements to come.
Being a fintech company, we needed to accommodate for a range of likely questions:
- Basic FAQS and questioning: i.e. ‘What do you do?’, ‘Are you legit?’.
- How to’s: i.e. how do I apply for a loan?, what do I need to apply for a loan?