Introducing Watson Assistant
Today, we are excited to announce the release of Watson Assistant, an evolution of Watson Conversation and Watson Virtual Agent. For Conversation users, you won’t have to do a thing, as the same features and functionality will still be there, plus more! We’re also announcing that Watson Virtual Agent will be retired. No reason to worry, as we’ll be incorporating key features of Watson Virtual Agent over time into Watson Assistant.
As part of the change, we’ve also developed domain specific solutions built on top of Watson Assistant. The team is starting with the following solutions:
• Watson Assistant for Automotive — A solution to connect your vehicles and your drivers through a virtual assistant that also connects them to the world around them.
• Watson Assistant for Hospitality — A solution to transform your hotel room with a virtual assistant that engages your guests in a new way.
• Watson Assistant for Industry — A framework embedding a virtual assistant into your cognitive consumer applications that can anticipate user needs to deliver personalized outcomes for any industry.
Of course, we’ll continue to work hard to expand these solutions to other domains over time. Learn more about these solutions here.
AVAILABLE TODAY
Content Catalog
Save time when building your virtual assistant with prebuilt intents. The intents range from customer care to industry specific, as well as other common chatbot controls. Feel free to add these to your virtual assistant, modify them, or add your own utterances.
Digressions
What do you do when a consumer interacting with your bot asks an unrelated question in the middle of a conversation? Using point and click, we’ve made it easy to allow your end users to change topic and have the user return to where they left off. Watch the video below to learn how.
Search:
It’s finally here! You can now quickly search for intents and entities, saving you time.
Dialog Folders:
Have issues organizing your nodes as you grow your dialog? Now with folders, you can easily group dialog nodes together keeping a clear dialog structure as you scale.
Context Setting:
Before, when setting context for a given dialog node, you had to go into our JSON editor. Now, we’ve added a simple interface to set context directly in the UI to make things easier.
Dialog Tracing
When you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem while using our Try it panel, see where the issue is. We’ve added a feature that allows you to see exactly which dialog nodes were hit during a given utterance.
User Analytics
We understand how critical it is to understand how your virtual assistant is performing, so we’ve expanded our dashboard metrics and analytics. As part of this release, we’re introducing some new metrics to better understand your assistant and users.
Separate Activity Logs from Workspace
We now separate activity logs and allow you to specify which log file to record all of your virtual assistant activity. This log file can be accessed by any Workspace to improve, while not impacting your current production Assistant.
Take a look at our release notes to learn more.
BETA Program
Finally, in addition to the new features we’ve recently added, we’re also extremely excited about what’s to come. While we can’t get into the details in this blog, we’ve setup a BETA program to allow you to get early access to the upcoming features. If you’re interested in joining the beta program, follow the brief instructions on how to request below. Please note, this is a waitlist, so it may be a few weeks before you are granted access.
Beta access is granted on an instance level, meaning you should NOT choose an instance that is in production. We suggest creating a new dev instance.
a) If you already have an account and need to create a new instance, login to the IBM Cloud console https://console.bluemix.net/
b) Click the Catalog option from the header
c) Navigate to or Search for the Watson Assistant tile in the Watson section and select it
d) Give your service instance a name, select a pricing plan and click Create.
e) Now when you access the tooling for Watson Assistant, you should be in the new service instance. If you’d like to change instances, click the Change link on your Workspaces page.
f) From the workspaces page of your new service instance, select Request beta access.
So go ahead, and check out the new Watson Assistant!
