Navigating SXSW via Cognitive Chatbot
How we built the demo app using cognitive services on the IBM Cloud
Last week, Mark Watson and I represented the Watson Developer Cloud in IBM’s installation at South by Southwest. IBM built a terrific space, inviting visitors to explore how IBM is making essential aspects of life more engaging, creative, and personal. In that spirit, we demonstrated a chat-driven app to help event attendees find interesting events at SXSW. We call it Cognitive Event Finder.
How it works
Cognitive Event Finder works by either interacting with our chatbot via SMS (Twilio, ftw!), or by using a single-page web app. We used the Watson Conversation service to implement a natural-feeling user interaction that takes attendees through the process of searching for SXSW Interactive (tech) talks, music gigs, or film screenings.
The actual search queries relied on IBM Cloudant, a JSON database service based on Apache CouchDB™. All our data on SXSW events is stored in here.
While Cloudant has a number of options for implementing search, we used Cloudant Search, the Lucene-based indexing engine built into the database service. It allowed us to combine text, time, and location data in user searches. For example, if someone were interested in virtual reality, we could not only search for sessions related to the subject, but also rank results by those happening soon and nearby. That’s a much more relevant response than a plain old database query.
Finally, we used Mapbox’s JavaScript client to visualize search results on a highly customizable map. We also used Mapbox underlay a nice street map using their basemap API.
Results in the field
The turnout was great. We gave the app to about 500 festival-goers, and they all felt it was going to help them more easily navigate the event.
Our primary goal, however, wasn’t to build the best event concierge app, but to illustrate the type of thing you could build with the cognitive services on the IBM Cloud. We’re glad people put it to use.
If you’re interested in building something similar, you can fork the GitHub repo. There’s also a YouTube video of the GIF above, in case that’s handy for sharing. Get in touch and let us know what you build, and please ♡ this article to share it on Medium. Thanks!
