Eagle Labs Workshop - How to build a chatbot in an hour

Eagle Labs Workshop - How to build a chatbot in an hour

Eagle Labs Brighton recently conducted a lunch and Learn Event where seven chatboteers gathered to build their very own IBM chat bot in an hour. The event was organized and presided by our Developer Community Advocate for Eagle Labs, Tim Minter.

The group consisted of Marketing, On-line Retail, and Tech startups who used their new BlueMix accounts to create a Watson Conversation service and a working multi-step conversation that recognized entities and used those entities in the conversation.

Using the online retailer as an example Tim walked the group through the stages of creating and testing a conversation. The group had the basics done in about 15 mins and then Tim was able to introduce Entities and conditions and how they can be used to massively enhance the chatbot. The participants then went on to create a greeting node that extracted the user’s name and used it in the conversation.

The idea of maintaining state was discussed as was getting the chatbot to finally do something like getting a listing of “red bags for men” from an on-line catalogue, and all the participants attempted some customization to their use-case and had a successful outcome.

This turned out to be a great workshop because Tim was able to assist people who couldn’t quite get things to work and everyone seemed to have some fun and there were smiles all round when they first saw their chatbot chat back to them :-).

Participants requested a follow up session to actually get their chatbot to do “something”, at the end of a particular conversation flow for example.

Following the success of this workshop, Tim Minter would soon be scheduling an “advanced” workshop for those that want to go further and for those that could not make it.

Follow @eagle_labs_bri for more information on upcoming events.