IBM Watson API Chatbot Review

IBM WATSON OVERALL RATING

IBM's Watson provides developers with all the tools they need to deploy high quality, enterprise-grade chatbots that can help transform and revolutionize the way a company interacts with its customers. 

The platform’s artificial intelligence technology is highly capable, featuring a variety of tools that help streamline the process of creating a virtual assistant.

Programming intents, entities, dialogs, for example, can be done in just a few minutes thanks to Watson Assistant’s uncomplicated platform, generated suggestions, and catalog filled with industry-specific content.

Testing out Watson is also easy and completely free, allowing users to make up their minds about the product before purchasing it.

Overall, IBM’s decades of experience developing groundbreaking technology shows in Watson’s as evidenced by the large number of businesses benefiting from the platform’s AI capabilities.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Capabilities

Watson lets developers build chatbots that employ full AI-integrated, conversational interfaces into any channel, including mobile applications, customer service tools, websites, and phones.

Those looking to integrate Watson’s chatbot technology with WordPress, for example, are able to do so thanks to one of IBM’s plugins.

With support for over thirteen languages, Watson users can communicate more effectively and reach a wider, global audience.

Watson-developed chatbots go beyond simple questions and answer chats.

Instead of mimicking human interactions, they participate in full conversations and walk customers through actual processes.

Watson chatbots understand their limitations, knowing when to ask question to those they interact with for clarity.

They can search for answers from large knowledge bases of industry-relevant content and are also able to direct consumers to human assistants when necessary.

Watson can also store conversations and learn how to further personalize the virtual assistant interaction experience.

The platform’s analytics dashboard and conversation logs help users visualize and understand trends in user message data.

This can lead to action on any messages that might have led consumers to confusion.

Watson Assistant can also help avoid any conflicts that may arise if multiple teams create sample sentences for the same virtual assistant.

The Watson AI automatically recommends fixes that can be done to resolve this issue.

Over time, the conversations stored by Watson can become a repository of data regarding customer preferences and modes of engagement.

The ability for Watson’s chatbots to learn can significantly increase the impact of a business.

How to Test Out IBM Watson Chatbot

Consumers who want to test out the capabilities of IBM Watson-developed chatbots can open a free account capped at 10,000 API calls.

This free “Lite” account also features five skills, pre-built content, a seven-day analytics dashboard, and 100 dialog nodes.

Users can learn how to create a chatbot from scratch through the functionality provided by IBM Watson Assistant.

IBM’s 15- to 30-minute chatbot tutorial first teaches users how to quickly create intents and entities, which can create meaningful examples for Watson to understand and train with.

It then demonstrates how to capture context from users to reduce redundancy by using slots.

Finally, it shows how to structure and organize dialog flows through the use of handlers and digressions, tool that can manage users that go off-topic and lead them back to their original conversation, respectively.

Setting Up Intents and Entities

In addition to its written tutorial, Watson users can access video digests that show how to use specific tools.

Intents and entities are both easy to set up thanks to Watson’s simple interface, suggestion generator, and broad catalog of pre-made content.

An intent is defined as the goal or purpose of a user’s input. To add one, users simply need to press “Add Intent”, followed by providing an intent name and description.

They are also asked to create several examples of the kind of questions consumers would ask the virtual assistant.

These examples train Watson to more efficiently identify the purpose of a consumer’s query.

Intents do not have to be created from scratch; users may import them from elsewhere or browse for them in Watson’s content catalog.

Entities are a portion of a user’s input, which can be used to provide a different response to a particular intent.

Just like intents, entities are created by pressing “Add Entity” and providing a name.

The platform’s content catalog includes numerous system entities that may be used as they are or be further modified to fit a user’s needs.

Each entity may be packed with various values and their respective synonyms, for which Watson can generate suggestions.

The platform’s Fuzzy Matching technology ensures that Watson chatbots can capture things such as different forms of the same word and spelling mistakes.

Both intent and entities may be tested out in the platform itself to see if they work as expected.

Administrative Platform

Watson Assistant’s chatbots are fully integrated with other Watson APIs.

It also includes Customer Care, Banking, Insurance, Telco, Utilities, and eCommerce content.

Ideally, the best developer to deploy the Watson chatbot solution will have some interest or training in AI or other conversational systems.

Additionally, close contact with a conversational strategist is also essential since they will be able to create truly effective conversations for the consumer.

IBM provides additional help to users in the way of code examples.

Users can use these codes to build chatbots with specific features, such as a shopping cart for retailers, customer service apps for mobile devices, and simple service codes for banks.

The IBM Cloud provides starter kits for developers to custom design a chatbot experience that best fits their enterprise's needs.

Watson can live in IBM’s isolated cloud environment or on-premises, allowing the customer to build and scale their need for the platform as they go.

Consumer Experience

Watson chatbots are trusted by thousands of businesses across the globe, being employed across multiple industries.

They have helped end consumers – including many major international companies - get what they need more quickly and efficiently, streamlining customer interaction and increasing productivity.

H&R Block has used the platform to help maximize client refunds and E&J Gallo has used Watson to develop more efficient irrigation that has increased the quality of their grapes.

Autodesk sped up customer response time by 99 percent thanks to Watson’s powerful learning techniques, which analyze user inquiries at a deeper level in order to extract their intent, context, and meaning.

Additionally, UBank developed a virtual agent through IBM Watson’s conversation technology that has helped customers apply for home loans in a timelier fashion.

Expertise

IBM is a pioneer in the fields of computing and information technology.

The company is credited for many revolutionary inventions, among those the floppy disk, the magnetic stripe card, the SQL programming language, and the hard disk drive.

It was also one of the first innovators of voice recognition and natural conversation technologies.

IBM’s pioneering work created Deep Blue, the computer that defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

After this, the creation of Watson was a massive multidisciplinary effort involving staff and graduate students from some of the top universities and institutions across the country, including MIT, USC's Information Sciences Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, etc.

Watson went on to defeat previous Jeopardy! long-time champions and is now implemented by IBM for a number of uses thanks to its ability to process large data, interact in natural language, and learn from its interactions with people and other computers.

Pricing

IBM offers five plan levels for its Watson-developed chatbots and Assistant technology.

On the company’s initial free plan, chatbots developed with Watson come with up to 10,000 API calls a month for free.

After users reach that monthly cap, the technology costs $.0025 per call on the Standard Plan.

This plan features unlimited calls and dialog nodes, additional skills, a thirty-day analytics dashboard, and up to ten versions.

Consumers must contact IBM directly to request a price for any of its three other plans—Plus, Premium, and Private.

The Plus and Premium plans include a number of additional tools, including disambiguation, service desk integrations, intent conflict resolution, data isolation, and more.

IBM is only one of the top companies currently offering chatbot platforms.

Read our review here of 2019's Best Chatbot providers to explore all of your options.