Watson Conversation Cheat Sheet

Transcription

1 Watson Conversation Cheat Sheet This cheat sheet assumes a Watson Conversation Service and a Conversation Workspace have been created and you can access the service. Open the service and click the Launch Tool button. You will see the list of Workspaces; click the Workspace you want modify. There are three parts to the page you see.. Intents (What the user meant) Entities (something that you want to pick out of what the user said) Dialogue (the conversation flow you design) Intents You should think of all the things a user may want to ask. It will be easy to get a small list of these but you should put a lot of effort into adding as many as possible. Obviously the more times a user has their intent recognised and dealt with, the better. Entities Entities are critical to making your chatbot do anything other than provide default text answers to questions it knows about. They provide the training that the chat service needs to appear like it is hearing what you are saying. eg Humans know all the names of colours. If we define a list of words as being colours we can train the service to know the user has mentioned a colour when one of those words is used. Watson conversation comes with a few default Entities that you can turn on eg names of people. Dialogue This is where you define what the chart should say when it detects the user s intent. You create a flow that might include for example, another question and then a reply and so on. eg. If the chatbot identifies the user wants to know what bags you have in stock you may then ask what they want to use it for and maybe at the end, ask they are interested in gift wrapping. Adding a Conversation We will work through the three tabs in the workspace. Intents Tab 1. Go to the Intents tab 2. Click Create then give the Intent a name. This name will be used when we build the dialogue later e.g. asking_about_bags. The User Example section is where you add as many ways to ask the question as you can think of. Pro tip: You should include typos snd auto corrected words in this list and use the devices you know users will be using to enter them (you type differently on keyboards vs tablets

2 vs phones of different screen sizes). In an established help desk type environment you will have these Intents and ways people have worded them from call recordings or logs. Entities Tab If we want to watch out for something the user has said we need to use Entities. Say we want to see if the user has mentioned colour, and, if they have, use that data. If we do not want to watch out for something the user has mentioned we can skip this part for this conversation. 1. Go to the Entities tab and make sure My Entities is selected. 2. Click Create New and name it colour. You define the list of words that you want Watson to recognise as colours. Note the Synonyms field. This is where you can add extra words that the user might use to mean the colour. So if you have a Red value you could add scarlet as a synonym ( bright red would already be picked up because it has the word red in it). Note: the interface is a bit funny currently, and it you want to add synonyms to values you have defined already you need to click Done then go back to the Entity to edit the synonym values. Pro tip: Watson Conversation has some built in entities called System Entities. These are turned OFF by default but can be very useful. Take a look at them and turn then on individually in the System entities tab (next to My entities). You'll also see a switch to turn on Fuzzy matching to deal with user typos. This is great unless the entity is not real word or is very short. Dialogue Tab This is where we program * the conversation using the Intents and Entities (optional) we have created or turned on. This is done using nodes than can be connected together. 1. Go to the Dialog tab 2. If no flow is defined, you will see the Create button. A flow with two default nodes will be created. If you have a flow already then move to step Once you have a flow, click the Add node button. It will be created between the two default nodes and opened for editing. The order of nodes is important as Watson will flow top to bottom, stopping at the first Intent match. 4. The node name is optional and the Condition text will be used as the name, if a name is not given. It seems to be common practice not to name nodes. 5. Go to the If bot recognises: field and start typing the name of the Intent you want to trigger this dialogue. Autocomplete will pop up and show the intent (with the preceding # symbol). Select that intent. You ll also see that autocomplete lets you create a new Intent, Entity or Condition (not covered here) right from this field. If you select one those options you will find

3 a new blank Intent or Entity on the relevant tab and you can carry one creating the dialogue without having to define those until later. 6. Add what you want Watson to reply with in the Then respond with: section. Add multiple responses and consider setting Watson to respond with randomly selected responses from your list to make the conversation more interactive. Testing We can test the dialogue right in this window. At the top right of the page you ll see this icon Click it to open the Try it out pane. Now if we type in do you have any bags at the bottom of that pane we get this: Where did the Hello. How can I help you bit of text at the top of the Try it out pane come from? It came from one of the default nodes created when you created the dialogue the Welcome node. Open that to see how. What is the other default node? That is triggered if no other node is triggered ie if the user types anything that isn t defined as an Intent. Pro tip: You ll see that the nods are highlighted when you press enter after typing something in the Try it out pane. It is showing you the flow route taken to deliver the response. Did you also see the drop down box in the response in the Try it out pane? This actually allows you to train Watson if it makes a mistake in identifying the Intent of your text. It will add your text to the Entity you select so that next time it will identify the Intent correctly. Lets try using Entities? We can make the conversation clever now by incorporating entity we defined earlier. It s really quite easy (ridiculously easy in fact), Watson is already recognising words we defined as being colours and, behind the scenes, picking them out of what the user has typed (and critically, storing them away for use in the dialogue later). 1. We called our colour is actually a variable (for the is a box that Watson has put the colour, if found, into).

4 3. Watson puts the value is has picked out of the user s input into that variable. 4. To use that variable (for non-programers, to get at what is in that box) we simply put it ) in the response text as shown below. Now when we type in have you got any red bags? we get this reply: *conversations can be pretty simple and those do not need any programming background. More complex and impressive things can be achieved though with a little bit of programming knowledge. Watson Conversation is designed to be maintained, corrected and added to by people with the Knowledge Management role in an organisation. These people are typically involved in real interactions with people but are not programmers or even that technical in some cases (help desk, customer service etc). They may work with someone who is technical to implement a new conversation that does something e.g. a password reset or a sales cart build. BIG Pro tip: A huge part of the Watson Conversation service is ongoing training. The service logs every interaction and what actions were taken at each step. This is where you train Watson further so that things that it has come across that it couldn t handle are added to it s knowledge. You may find new intents crop up eg when it s Olympics time people might suddenly start asking do you have any Olympics stuff?.

5 Pro tip: A common gotcha can be that data collected from users to define Intents is done at a certain time of year. In the summer no one is asking about wellies so you don t have any intents about them.