Watson Assistant can now include video, audio, and other rich media in dialog

Why stick with just text? Add media and web widgets to make conversations engaging, interactive, and fun for your customers

Watson Assistant can now display dynamic rich media and custom content through its out-of-the-box web client, making dialog with end customers much more visual, engaging, and interactive.

Dialog designers can now put rich media — like videos and audio — and interactive content — like surveys, maps, and calendars — into a conversation, without writing any code. This means the conversation can illustrate onboarding tasks with video, let the user select an appointment day and time on a calendar widget, or see an interactive map for directions. Chatbots no longer need to be limited to just text.

As with the rest of the Watson Assistant chat client, this functionality comes out of the box, which means clients don’t need to write any code. To deploy, you just paste a few lines of our javascript into your website. It’s easy to build and easy to maintain.

Let’s see the feature in action.

Rich Media Support

The builder interface makes it easy and intuitive to add rich media. A drop-down menu lets the builder choose the type of media, asks for the URL location, and meta data (such as alternative text) for the content.

Configure in your Dialog, just like images, by simply providing a link.

Videos are especially useful when you want to engage your customers with multiple steps, or walk your customers through how to do something. We support YouTube, Vimeo, mp4 files, and more! For audio, we support SoundCloud, Mixcloud, and mp3 files.

Iframes are used to incorporate interactive third-party content — for example, you can give your customers directions through Google Maps, provide a customer satisfaction survey through Survey Monkey, or let customers book appointments through Calendly or Open Table. There are countless web widgets that can be embedded into the conversation.

Help your customers with targeted links to web chat, pre-loaded to certain topics!

In addition to the rich media feature, we have added the ability to point users to a specific part of a dialog flow. Builders can now create URL links that go directly to a web chat and start conversations on specific topics.

For example, you might want to send an email inviting customers to update their account information. You can include a link that opens the web chat on your site and sends the initial message, “I want to update my account”. You can include these links in emails or any sort of external application, like an SMS message or Instagram ad.

In your Web Chat embed script, define IDs with utterances that your Assistant is ready to handle! Then, simply add that ID to the end of your URL: www.website.com?wa_lid=a12

Check out how to set up this feature here.

Customize faster, with less maintenance, with new support for Carbon design components

When customizing your web chat, instead of creating (and maintaining) your own UI components — like buttons, tables, file uploads, date pickers, etc. — you can now easily use the Carbon design library!

Check out an example tutorial on how to add the Carbon date picker to your Web Chat here.

Using Carbon will enable you to get your custom content up and running much faster. You can use these Carbon components when customizing web chat in user-defined responses and writeable elements. These components will inherit any theming customizations you have made to the web chat — so you don’t need to worry about redoing your styles and themes.

We are extremely excited about these features, and look forward to seeing how it will create more seamless experiences for your customers. Check out our release notes for more information.

Sign up for Watson Assistant to start building, and if you haven’t already signed up, join the IBM Watson Apps Community to continue the discussion with our experts and other Watson Assistant users!