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Role

Bot setup, Node-RED/Slack Hook-up

Responsibilities

For this application I setup a simple bot with Watson that was meant to help fix a user’s printer issues. It was hooked up to Slack through Node-RED so a user could communicate with it.

Technologies

Watson, IBM, Node-RED

Chatbot - IBM Watson

For our Cognitive Computing course we had an assignment to set up a bot using IBM Watson. The bot was meant to solve a problem that a user may have so in my case I created one that was meant to help a user with printer problems. I set up intents which are essentially purposes/goals that are expressed by the users input. So an example intent may be printer_brand which could be a user asking about a certain brand of printer. There are also entities which are meant to represent information in the user input that may be relevant to the user purpose/goal. The IBM docs explains it in a simple way: Intents represent verbs (what the user wants to do) and entities are like nouns (the object of, or the context for, a particular action).

A few images of intents/entities I set up as well as the Node-RED layout and Slack test chat.

Once I set up proper intents and responses I hooked it up to Slack using Node-RED. The bot would be able to communicate through Slack just as it would through the IBM web interface. It was quick and simple to deploy and even easier to use.