Watson Assistant Integrations: channel your knowledge
Watson Assistant lets you connect your expertise to users anytime, on any channel. This overview covers the Integrations page, the hub where you can manage all of your assistant’s channels and extensions.
IBM’s first principle for trust and transparency in AI states that “The purpose of AI is to augment human intelligence”. In that spirit, Watson Assistant is designed to empower users to extend their expertise, channel their knowledge and spread it wherever it’s needed.
A single end-to-end solution, available anywhere
We’ve been writing a lot recently about the new and exciting methods Watson Assistant’s developers have created to orchestrate your connections to third-party APIs. That’s because designing effective conversations is just the beginning. For your assistant to reach its potential as a comprehensive user solution, it needs to seamlessly call out to and pull information from the ever-growing world of web apps.
Managing all of the channels, integrations, and extensions out there may seem daunting on first look, but Watson Assistant takes the stress out of the process with its Integrations page. Integrations consolidates all of your channels, extensions, and third-party connections in one spot, streamlining your ability to manage how and where users interact with your assistant.
The page is organized into three sections:
- Essential channels — The bedrock of any assistant’s ability to reach users: Web chat and Phone
- Extensions — Customize your assistant by adding Search capabilities and connecting to third-party APIs with the Build custom extensions option
- Channels — Deploy your assistant to Slack, Facebook Messenger and SMS/WhatsApp with Twilio
Web chat is automatically configured for you and easily deployable to your website with a simple copy and paste of a JavaScript snippet, no coding required. The rest of the channels and extensions require a little bit of work to enable, but as you’ll see, the work is not that hard and absolutely worth it.
Web chat: a complete solution
The title web chat accurately captures the surface-level function of this channel: users input a request into the assistant, the assistant responds. That, however, is just the tip of the iceberg of what this feature is capable of: web chat is designed to be a comprehensive problem-solving experience.
Web chat contains everything customer care providers need to solve user problems and prevent dead ends, and even though it’s automatically configured for you, web chat allows you to customize both its function and design. In other words, web chat’s user interface lets you get started easily without limiting your ability to personalize.
A non-exhaustive list of web chat’s features:
- Recommending topics when first opened
- Providing suggestions when user requests don’t match an action
- Planned escalation to human agents AND automatic escalation to a human agent when input doesn’t match with the assistant’s training
- Easy linking functionality from external applications, like email
- Easily customizable home screen
- Built-in rich media support (iframes, video etc.)
- Advanced extensibility that enables PII filtering, custom content, and deeper integration with client-side and backend APIs
And web chat keeps evolving. IBM recently added the ability to plug a date picker into your conversations!
Web chat can also integrate with virtually any live agent service. Watson Assistant has a variety of no-code options and extensions packs available for Genesys, Salesforce, Twilio and Zendesk, and if you don’t see your preferred call center, our extension packs make it easy to custom integrate with the service of your choice.
To sum up, web chat is engineered to engage with users when they need help, solve their tasks through dynamic and interactive elements, and provide numerous paths to recovery so a user can always find a solution to their issue.
Phone: give your solution a voice
Plus- and enterprise-level users have the option of adding a phone channel to their assistant. The phone integration utilizes IBM Watson Text to Speech service to convert your assistant’s content into audio for phone conversations and IBM Watson Speech to Text to feed user responses into your actions.
When you add the phone channel, you make Watson’s industry-leading natural language processing capabilities available to callers and eliminate the tedium of listening to an IVR operator list multiple options. The assistant guides callers through your actions with the same sophistication over the phone as it does in chat, plus Watson Assistant’s voice-generation technology delivers a natural sounding vocal performance.
Options for connecting and customizing your assistant for phone include:
- Generating a free telephone number with Intelepeer
- Connecting it to your existing infrastructure using a SIP trunk (check out Hey Watson, Can I Have Your Number? for details)
- Configuration with live agent services like Genesys and Twilio
- Watson Assistant’s customization suite, where you can train your assistant on terminology specific to your company/industry
And as robust as the Phone integration is, IBM’s not sitting still; there are a lot of new features for phone coming down the pike. Make sure you keep an eye on this blog as we’re gearing up announce those in the near future.
Extensions and search: enhance your solution
As we’ve written before, contemporary customer care requires building an assistant capable of integrating with just about anything. And, if you’ve been keeping up with our recent slate of articles, you know that IBM is evolving and expanding the ways you can customize and extend your assistant.
A recap of the latest and greatest news:
- IBM has enabled custom extensions via a low code, easy-to-use feature that leverages OpenAPI specification
- You can now integrate your API with IBM App Connect to connect to hundreds of widely used apps that utilize low-code tooling
- You can easily connect your assistant to IBM Cloud Functions via Watson Assistant’s extensions
The functionality of this feature and these updates are practically limitless. You can connect your assistant to CRMs like Hubspot, business operation apps like Salesforce, and marketing tools like MailChimp, all in a fraction of the time that traditional API connections typically require.
An equally powerful way to customize your assistant is to enrich it with search through integration with IBM Watson Discovery. Discovery uses smart document understanding to mine your company’s documents for relevant data.
When you provision a Discovery instance, train it to mine your content, and connect it with your assistant, you add another skill that will ensure your assistant never has to say “Sorry, I didn’t understand”.
At the moment, provisioning an instance of Discovery is the best method of adding search to your assistant, but (stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before) there’s something new coming down the pike. Keep your eyes on this feed for all the latest updates.
Channels: messaging with your assistant
The final section of Integrations contains quick links to configure your assistant for deployment to four of the most widely used digital messaging apps:
- Slack
- Facebook Messenger
- SMS with Twilio
- WhatsApp with Twilio
Provided you have an existing account with these services, making your assistant available there is possible in a matter of minutes! Simply click Add + and follow the prompts.
Note: while these messaging apps are grouped together on the page, the steps to integrate each of them with your assistant are unique. As always, consult the New Assitant docs to get the fullest picture on integration requirements.
A solution users can trust
IBM’s vision for Watson Assistant centers on resolving what we call “solution overload”. For end users, locating the brick in the tech stack where their solution is located has traditionally required indeterminate time commitments, constantly restating personal information, and generally exhausting self-service tasks.
IBM designed Watson Assistant to serve as an intelligent routing agent that could employ natural language processing at speed and at scale, seamlessly interact with any existing web-based application, and make the kind of smart routing decisions needed to solve issues as quickly as possible.
The speed and scalability of Watson Assistant mean users have a single solution they can trust, and enterprise developers and content authors are able to infuse their knowledge into a single solution without having to abandon their existing customer care investments. If you haven’t gotten started with Watson Assistant, check out our Getting Started series, or create your first assistant and start building actions on the IBM cloud.
