How can we build a virtual assistant that makes a real difference to businesses by improving customer satisfaction and reducing costs? What makes a virtual assistant suitable for businesses? These assistants need to better understand what is being asked and engage in multi-turn conversations as well as digressing to other…

IBM Watson Assistant has recently introduced a new feature called Contextual Entities, and we are going to build a simple bot to show it in action. If you are not familiar with Watson Assistant you may want to read Getting Chatty with IBM Watson first. Entities are used for identifying…

A good way to learn how to build a bot in Watson Assistant (formerly Conversation) is to see an example of how a bot is built. So I thought it would be useful to walk through the details of an example bot. If you are not familiar with the basics…

This article describes a new feature in Watson Assistant (formerly known as Watson Conversation), called “Digressions”. If you are not familiar with building a dialog you may want to read “Getting Chatty with IBM Watson” first. Normally in a conversation when you have gone down a particular flow in the…

Do you remember the IBM Watson advert with Bob Dylan from a while back? I thought it would be an interesting project to actually try to build something like that. It’s also a fun way to show how to build a conversational analysis solution, that is creating a corpus of…

For my latest little side project, I decided to do something a bit more experimental…the world’s first cognitive writing game! Try it at cogniwrite.mybluemix.net The aim of the game is to write a story following certain steps and emotions. So the game tells you the next step in the story…

Chatbot Design Tutorial — Conversational Design is a new area of design which has come about due to the rise of chatbots. Just as User Experience (UX) design is important in building a great traditional interface, Conversational Design is important for creating great chatbots. …

Recently we had another hackday in the Watson team at IBM (see our last hackday project “A Cognitive Mystery”). This time we decided to design and build a solution that would enable using Watson Assistant as a guide. Now this could be a guide for almost anything, e.g. cooking, tutorials…

If you want to get in on the bot action, here’s a simple way to do it. Check out Burger Bot, which is all about your fast food experience. However, for us this is a really simple bot just to show you how things work. There are three main parts…