IBM Watson for Building Chatbots

Watson gives you access to detailed developer resources that help you get started fast, including documentation and SDKs on GitHub.

IBM Watson

There are several IBM Watson APIs available on the IBM Cloud. One of them is IBM Watson Assistant. Watson Assistant enables you to build apps that include natural language processing and structured conversation. The service provides an API which you can call from an app or website to hook into your chatbot.

Watson Assistant API can extract meaning from natural language, discover patterns in data sets, understand the "tone" of language, translate languages, convert text to speech and speech to text, perform text classification, and build a virtual agent (chatbot).

Watson as an Assistant

Watson is more of an assistant. It knows when to seek the answer from the knowledge base, when to ask for clarity and when to lead yourself to the human. Watson Assistant can work in any cloud -- allowing businesses to bring AI to their data and apps wherever they are.

IBM Watson Assistant is marketed as a solution for companies of any size who want to build their voice or touch-enabled virtual assistant. To create a chatbot using IBM Watson API is mandatory to have an IBM/Bluemix account to start and it's free (Lite Version). The chatbot is built using intents, entities and Watson Developer Cloud to interact with the chatbot.

Dialogflow vs Watson

When we compare IBM Watson with Dialogflow, there is a question: what is better? If you need a competent Artificial Intelligence Software product for your company you must make time to examine a wide range of alternatives.

In 2019, user satisfaction level for IBM Watson is at 99% while for Dialogflow is at 96%. Both bot frameworks have their pros and cons. Dialogflow and Watson Assistant provide a UI tool to design conversation flow logic for complex dialogues.

Dialogflow provides maybe an easier and quicker way to create a custom conversational AI bot, while IBM Watson offerings target more corporations and enterprise organisations. For those who start to learn how to build a chatbot, it may be better to choose and begin with Dialogflow.

Watson conversation is expensive compared to Dialogflow, while the development interface in Dialogflow could have been better. Dialogflow bot for website integration does not support buttons and links while Watson Assistant for web integrations supports buttons and links usage.

Watson is a Collection of APIs

Watson is not a single thing. Watson is a collection of APIs that can be used to solve various challenges and Watson Assistant is part of it. Many senior developers think that today there's nothing on the market like Watson Assistant. With the proper expectations and in the proper hands, Watson's APIs can be used to do some really phenomenal stuff.