IBM Watson Assistant: How to make API calls from dialog

Question

We have integrated IBM Watson Assistant skill/workspace with a Facebook page using the Watson features. We did this using an integrated approach from Virtual Assistants tab.

We are able to get the response in Facebook Messenger from Watson skill/workspace FAQS. Now we want to add a few more questions to skill/workspace and get the response from a database.

We know that we can use IBM Cloud Functions to get DB data and respond back with the data, but Cloud Functions action types (web_action and cloud_function or server) incur a cost, hence we are looking for another approach.

We have our own APIs developed for the DB and want use those in Watson Assistant dialogue node actions. Please let us know how we can add it in actions and get a response from the API without using client application/cloud functions.

Note: we haven't developed any application for this chatbot, we directly integrated Watson skill/workspace with the Facebook page and trying to call API calls wherever we require them from the dialogue nodes.

Answer 1

As you can see, IBM Watson Assistant allows to invoke three different types of actions from a dialog node .

• client,
• server (cloud_function),
• web_action.

Because for cloud_function and web_action the action is hosted as Cloud Function on IBM Cloud, the computing resources are charged. For type client, your app would handle the API call and the charges depend on where your app is hosted. Thus, there are always costs.

What you could do is to write a wrapper function that is deployed as web_action or cloud_function. Thus, there isn't much of computing resource needed and the charges would be minimal. But again, independent of the action type, there are always costs (maybe not charges) - one way or another...