This page will be devoted to IBM information.  Whether you use us or DIY, we want to be an advisor, guide and worker “bee” (I bee M icon) to help you maximize your chatbot performance and usage.  Here’s some new details:

As part of this evolution, we’ve developed domain-specific solutions built on top of Watson Assistant:

  • 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.

Of course, we’ll continue to work hard to expand these solutions to other domains over time. We’re also retiring Watson Virtual Agent, however, many of the key features will be brought into Watson Assistant.

Search:
You can now quickly search for intents and entities, saving time when building your virtual assistant.

Dialog Folders:
So how do you manage all of your dialog nodes as you scale our your virtual assistant? With folders, you can easily group dialog nodes together keeping a clear dialog structure as you scale your conversational application.

Context Setting:
Today, when setting context for a given dialog node, users need to go into our JSON editor. This is no longer an issue, as we have added a simple interface to set context directly in the UI.

Dialog Tracing:
When building a virtual assistant, you often want to test it out in our Try it panel. What happens when you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem? We’ve added a feature that allows you to see exactly what dialog nodes were hit during a given utterance.

User Analytics:
It’s critical you understand how your virtual assistant is performing. We are committed to continually expanding our dashboard metrics and analytics to support your assistant. As part of this release, we are introducing some new metrics to better understand your users. This includes total messages, messages per conversation, total users and conversations per user.

Separate Activity Logs from Workspace:
When improving a virtual assistant, you don’t want to impact the production instance while you are making changes. We now allow you to specify a 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.

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 the topic and have the user return to where they left off. For example, imagine a user is in the middle of adding their spouse to their credit card and asks “Can also I add my 18-year-old to the card as well?” In this scenario, Digressions allows the question to be answered and return the user to where they left off in the “add a spouse” process.

Click on image for YouTube video on Digressions: