New Watson Conversation Service Makes it Simpler to Build an Intelligent Assistant

By Dan Miller on July 19, 2016

The “Botsplosion” continues to have a ripple effect across the world of Intelligent Assistants, and IBM has made major steps to make sure that Watson continues to play the role of force multiplier by supporting a packaging and pricing plan that appeals to a growing group of “non-technical” developers. On Monday July 11, Big Blue added IBM Watson Conversation Service to the Watson Developer Cloud in BlueMix. While that sounds rather complex, as illustrated in the YouTube video below, it makes it easier for the inner developer among customer care or marketing executives to create bots or IAs that are capable of recognizing the basic intent of an individual based on natural language input, identify the “entities” or knowledge bases with the best answers and conduct dialogues based on additional context or business rules as appropriate.

Further details on Conversation Service, in General Availability, can be found here. As you evaluate options, keep in mind that the IBM Watson suite includes several complementary services that enhance the quality of the dialogues supported. These include Watson Retrieve and Rank, which algorithmically understands which responses are most frequently requested and which answers rank most highly. In the coming months, Tone Analyzer will be closely mated with Conversational Services to assist in detecting sentiment or emotion. Both Speech to Text (transcription) and Text to Speech (supporting spoken output) will round out the roster of resources that support conversational bots.

To encourage adoption of Conversation Service, IBM is taking a page out of the successful playbook of Twilio, a cloud based telephony-app platform that completed a successful IPO that carried a $1 billion+ valuation. Pricing starts with a “free” offer on the shared public cloud, enabling up to three users (or “workspaces”) to build 25 Intents involving 25,000 “dialogue nodes.” The next step up is a “Standard” package for which carries a per-query charge of less than a penny ($0.0089).

The tools, computing resources and storage for the initial offers reside in IBM Bluemix Public cloud. In September, customers who opt for a “Premium” plan will be able to have access to private or individualized Application and Tooling, Cognitive Services, Runtime and Storange. Plans for 2017 include a single-tenant offering called Bluemix dedicated. This offer is tailored to accommodate business customers with additional security needs and other requirements.

The packaging of Conversational Services is a welcome addition to the pricing and deployment options for IBM Watson. From its inception in 2013, the Watson team had tailored offers, like Watson Engagement Advisor, promising speedy, profitable implementations (i.e. “up and running within 6 weeks and that enterprise customers who put it to use can expect to reach their ROI goals within 6 months”). While the ROI of a “free” offer is impossible to calculate, the highly affordable “Standard” package gives ample incentive for companies or individuals to get a taste of Watson’s cognitive resources.