IBM Watson for Building Chatbots

IBM Watson

Developer tools that make it easy to incorporate conversation, language, and search into your applications. Watson gives you access to detailed developer resources that help you get started fast, including documentation and SDKs on GitHub.

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
- Build a virtual agent (chatbot)

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 chatbot using IBM Watson API is mandatory to have a IBM/Bluemix account to start and its free (Lite Version.) Chatbot is built using intents, entities and Watson Developer Cloud to interact with the chatbot.

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. Aside from the robust features, the software which is simple and intuitive is always the better product.

In 2019, according to some market research, the 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 offering are targeting more corporations and enterprise organizations. For those who start to learn how to build a chatbot, maybe is better to choose and begin with Dialogflow.

Watson conversation is expensive compared to Dialogflow, while 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 Assistant and Dialogflow integrate with variety of other popular platforms and systems.

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 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.

More about Watson Assistant you can read at official IBM website: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/watson-assistant/