Integrating Watson Virtual Agent with self-service agents

Note: You can't create new instances of Watson Virtual Agent after June 19, 2018. This service was removed from the IBM Cloud Catalog on March 19, 2019.

Watson™ Virtual Agent provides preconfigured IBM Watson™ Assistant intents called capabilities, which you can use to quickly set up a virtual agent without needing to build your own Watson Assistant intents. You can then integrate your virtual agent with IBM® Voice Gateway 1.0.0.2 or later to provide automated service to customers over the phone.

About Watson Virtual Agent

You can use Watson Virtual Agent to provide the cognitive conversation for your Voice Gateway implementation, as an alternative to creating and configuring a dialog in the Watson Assistant service. Watson Virtual Agent is built on the Watson Assistant service, but it provides expertly pre-trained capabilities to help customers accomplish specific goals, such as Find nearest store. The most important capabilities for several industries, such as the energy or telecommunications industries, are grouped into capability packs. With Watson Virtual Agent capabilities, you can set up a cognitive virtual agent with zero machine-learning experience.

For more information about Watson Virtual Agent, see the Watson Virtual Agent documentation.

Configuring Watson Virtual Agent

In Voice Gateway Version 1.0.0.2 or later, you have several options for configuring Watson Virtual Agent.

Important: No matter how you configure Watson Virtual Agent, it can't be defined at the same time as the Watson Assistant service because they both fulfill the same role in your Voice Gateway self-service agent. You can configure either Watson Virtual Agent or Watson Assistant and switch between them, but both can't be concurrently enabled.

Single-tenant environment: In the SIP Orchestrator configuration, define your virtual agent on the related environment variables.

For Docker Engine deployments, define the environment variables in the docker-compose.yml file.

WATSON_VA_URL=https://api.ibm.com/virtualagent/run/api
WATSON_VA_BOT_ID=a23de67h-69e7-49cd-ae8b-0d39967ba829
WATSON_VA_CLIENT_ID=9h7f54cb-22d4-4a30-92b4-a64901928c7f
WATSON_VA_CLIENT_SECRET=rM8bI2gP4pV4sT0gB4xH4iP1mM8dF1oG0vN0hP1gD6wE6tM03X

For deployments to Kubernetes in IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, in the deploy.json file, define the environment variable name-value pairs in the env object of the vgw-sip-orchestrator container.

"env": [
  ...
  {
    "name": "WATSON_VA_URL",
    "value": "https://api.ibm.com/virtualagent/run/api"
  }, {
    "name": "WATSON_VA_BOT_ID",
    "value": "a23de67h-69e7-49cd-ae8b-0d39967ba829"
  }, {
    "name": "WATSON_VA_CLIENT_ID",
    "value": "9h7f54cb-22d4-4a30-92b4-a64901928c7f"
  }, {
    "name": "WATSON_VA_CLIENT_SECRET",
    "value": "rM8bI2gP4pV4sT0gB4xH4iP1mM8dF1oG0vN0hP1gD6wE6tM03X"
  }]

Using JSON configuration: In the multi-tenant JSON configuration file, for each tenant where you want to enable Watson Virtual Agent, configure a wva object that contains the virtual agent details:

...
"wva": {
  "wvaURL": "https://api.ibm.com/virtualagent/run/api",
  "wvaBotID": "a23de67h-69e7-49cd-ae8b-0d39967ba829",
  "wvaClientId": "9h7f54cb-22d4-4a30-92b4-a64901928c7f",
  "wvaClientSecret": "rM8bI2gP4pV4sT0gB4xH4iP1mM8dF1oG0vN0hP1gD6wE6tM03X",
}
...

Dynamic configuration: You can dynamically configure Watson Virtual Agent from within Watson Assistant so that you can switch between virtual agents during a call. For more information, see Dynamically configuring Watson services.