A monthly active user (MAU) is any unique user who has at least one meaningful interaction with your assistant or custom application over the calendar billing month. A meaningful interaction is an exchange in which a user sends a request to your service and your service responds. Welcome messages that are displayed at the start of a conversation are not charged.

A unique user is recognized by the user ID that is associated with the person that interacts with your assistant. The web chat and other built-in integrations set this property for you automatically.

You can calculate MAUs on your own, for both IBM Cloud and IBM Cloud Pak for Data.

To learn more, please visit us here.

If you’re using our REST API or web chat integrations, you need to provide us with a unique identifier (created by you) for each user that interacts with your assistant. We recommend a non-human identifiable database ID (such as a GUID) that doesn’t change throughout your customer lifecycle. If you’re using our Facebook, Slack or Intercom integrations, we pull the user ID from these sources automatically.

If you’re using our REST API and you don’t have a userID because your user is anonymous, we recommend that you generate your own randomized IDs using something like UUID (link resides outside of ibm.com).

If you’re using web chat and a user doesn’t have an identifier provided by you, we will generate one for your user and cookie them with the anonymous identifier in the event that they return to your site later in the month. That way you’ll only be charged once for that user.

If messages are sent with two different userIDs then yes, you will be charged twice. We recommend either prompting users to log in prior to initiating a chat or using the anonymous value for that user throughout all of their sessions.

We will charge based on the session identifier automatically, meaning that if this user returns a second time within the month after their session expires, they will be treated as two MAUs.

watsonx Assistant currently supports 13 languages and 1 in beta. However, support coverage differs from feature to feature. For a detailed view of the product’s support coverage by feature, go here.

The Plus plan starts at USD 140 and includes up to 1,000 monthly active users (MAUs). Additional MAUs are billed at USD 14 per 100 MAUs. When a user connects on voice, there is an additional cost of USD 9 per 100 voice MAUs.

To learn more about the Plus Plan and user-based metering, please visit us here.

The Enterprise with Data Isolation plan provides a number of additional security and privacy capabilities, including deployment in a single-tenant environment, support for HIPAA compliance, an increased number of instances and a longer retention period of analytics data.

A resource unit (RU) is an independent measure of a resource related to the use of the IBM Cloud Service. Each 1,000 tokens processed by a model equals one (1) resource unit. A token is a unit of input and output content such as individual words, subwords or characters of a sentence used in both generation and training.

Conversational Search is a new generative AI feature that uses native, no-code retrieval augmented generation (RAG) so that line-of-business users and SMEs can quickly add content from their knowledge base to their assistants to answer questions in natural conversation without manual authoring. 

IBM watsonx™ offers a selection of cost-effective, enterprise-grade foundation models. Granite is IBM's flagship series of LLM foundation models based on decoder-only transformer architecture. Granite language models are trained on trusted data spanning internet, academic, code, legal and finance. Granite 13b chat is a model tuned to improve its ability to perform Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for dialog use cases and works well with virtual agent and chat applications.