Show all synonyms of entities in the Watson Dialog response

Question

We basically have an Excel sheet with 4 columns First Name, Last Name, User ID, Department.

I want to train a Watson Assistant in such a way that if I pass a value which is belongs to column 1, the response should show me the values for other 3 columns. If I pass a value which belongs to column 4, the response should show me the values for other 3 columns and so on.

I am wondering, if I can achieve this using Watson Assistant. If yes, what intents or entities will I need to create?

What I tried was, create n(no of records) number of entities ie column 1 values with 3 synonyms - values of columns 2,3 and 4. But I am not sure how to pull related values of an entity matched.

I know using a DB would be ideal, but its a small bot and I would like to see if I can build it just using Watson Assistant and nothing else.

Answer 1

I would say "no", that does not work. "Robert Thomas" vs. "Thomas Peters" vs. "Peter Gabriel" vs. "Gabriel Smith". How should Watson Assistant react if only one word is put in?

Watson Assistant is a AI-powered dialog system, a chatbot, but not a database. You could have a dialog in which in the first step you ask for which part of the record is entered. This could be offered through an option the user has to click. Then, the firstname or the userID is provided and the system looks it up. The recommendation is to use a database for it, but it could also be a static list - even managed in Watson Assistant.

Look here for a tutorial on how to build a database-driven bot . The docs have a section on the expression language in Watson Assistant , eg, for handling your in-memory list of names.