Golden Rules For Setting Up an Awesome Personal Assistant

Guy Cohen
Guy Cohen
Sep 2, 2018 · 5 min read

What’s up friends? I’m back! How exciting. Today I’m going to share with you some secrets and tips about a topic that I care a lot about which is *drum roles*….

Personal Assistants! or in more common name, Chatbots!

תוצאת תמונה עבור ‪chatbot‬‏

So yeah, it can be everything — from Siri and Alexa to Google Home, but I’m going to focus on IBM Watson Personal Assistance Platform that allows you to create your own personal assistant, and in my opinion — it’s one of the best tools in the market.

As part of my job I implemented and created tons of personal assistants, for startups and enterprises a like, and I gain a lot of insights from each work I had done, and I would love to share with you 5 tips, or as I call them, Golden Rules, for creating a great chatbot. why are those rules important? They will help you create an awesome user experience and a well-thought chatbots. I gave a lecture few months ago about it in the “Third Annual Chatbot Summit” here in Israel, so for those of you who are looking for the video — check out the end of this post! Let’s start!


Number 1 — Connection is everything!

So yeah, I know it sounds like a cliche, but trust me it really works. You should try to connect other APIs and component to your chatbots. Why is it so good? It enables the user to get more insights about the process you are trying to walk him through and it makes it easier for him. How can you do it? easily. IBM Watson Assistant platform enables you o connect other IBM APIs such as Speech to Text or Visual Recognition to support different kind of inputs. Moreover, it allows you to connect to other components, such as Trip Advisor API and so on.

biNumber 2 — Keep your Dialog Simple!

Well, I think it’s sell explanatory. It is very appealing and important for a user to be engaged with an easy-as-possible dialog flow that imitates a conversation with a human agent. With that in mind, the best practice is to think of short sentences, with clear purpose that the user will know exactly how to response. If using WH Questions — try to keep them as simple as possible with no complex sentences. IBM Watson Personal Assistance allows you to create the perfect dialog flow, with aggregated flow that allows you to support different contexts.

Number 3 — use clicking instead of writing

Some would say that writing is necessary to turn it into a chatbot. Well… there is something about that, but remember, users like to engage with a really easy conversation. when you make user write a lot of text sometimes they can get lost, and your PA wouldn’t understand the purpose of the user. When using buttons or clickable images to move forward in the dialog, it would be easier for you to take the user through the journey you want to take him through, plus you totally control the flow — which makes it easier for you to deal with bad inputs or change the conversation if needed. IBM Watson Personal Assistance helps you to create HTML and JS base dialog flow, with the options to add buttons and other components so you totally would be in control of the flow.

Number 4 — Pretty User Interface makes all the difference

You know that engaging with beautiful content is a must! IBM Watson Personal Assistance allows you to design the best PA you want with clickable images, HTML and JavaScript. That will allow you to create the user experience of your dreams.

number 5 — Build, Measure, Learn

I’m sure most of you are well familiar with the lean startup method. In this method you are always evaluating yourself and your product to make sure you are on the right track. If you are not seeing the outcomes you expect — you pivot. Why is it important to apply this technique while creating PA? Users are dynamic, they have different questions and most of the time you think you found the perfect conversation flow on the first time, but most of the times you see that a lot of other questions are not answered. What do you need to do? Pivot! IBM Watson Personal Assistance allows you measuring and insights from conversation such as: What is the top 3 “Intents” (=user purpose in a question), how many conversations have been held on a specific day and more. That allows you to generate smart content to your PA, will help you understand your users better — and provide answers for their questions.


That’s it for today friends! I think we covered a lot of helpful tips for you today, that will help you getting into the PA-world. New to PA? Want to learn more? Visit “Chatbot Summit” Community’s meetup on Tuesday, our one and only Tal Ne’eman — an awesone developer advocate from IBM Alpha Zone will be there to give a talk. Sign up here! and check the event on Facebook.

Also, here’s a link to the video of this post, more examples and comments right there.

Wanna stay updated? Subscribe to my blog and check out IBM Tel Aviv’s city page!

See you in the next post friends!

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