IBM Watson Dialog Concept

Question

I am creating Watson Dialog Service. My question is : do we always need the formatted XML file for the input or is there a way by which we can feed data in to Watson from other sources like from several web URLs etc? Because when we will have a huge amount of data how XML will be able to deal and creating of XML files will also be difficult as data grows. Kindly help to understand the basic concept.

Answer 1

It is possible to configure an existing XML Dialog by setting up profile variables.

The Set Profile Variables API call on the Dialog Service is key to priming up a dialog: https://watson-api-explorer.mybluemix.net/apis/dialog-v1#/

Sadly, this is also the most poorly documented call in their docs.

Have a look at the What's in Theaters example from IBM. This is by far the most comprehensive application that shows how their Dialog Service can interact with other Watson enabled services like Natural Language Classifier and also third party apps.

• Source Code: https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/movieapp-dialog
• Documnentation: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/doc/ega_docs/dialog_ega.shtml

Based on this you have to decide if the Dialog service is suitable for your purpose or can play a small role in your larger application when combined with other services.

Conversational Agent Application Starter Kit: https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/conversational-agent-application-starter-kit