Non-league chatbot in IBM Watson Assistant for Burgess Hill Town FC
Ever been to a lower league football match and wondered “who is that number 7?”
I have, and this chatbot demo aims to resolve that.
Choosing the right tools
One of the things I like about IBM Watson Assistant is that in theory it integrates with IBM Watson Discovery, meaning that your chatbot assistants can go search a knowledge base if there’s nothing in the user’s input that matches conditions in the dialog (or actions) based on any recognised intents or entities.
The key words in the above paragraph? Yes, in theory, because while in the Discovery back end I can run the query:
metadata.source.url::”https://bhtfc.co.uk/fixtures/first-team/"
and have it return the only result that can be a match, when the query is invoked via Assistant’s Dialog it just gives me 3 other results, based seemingly on a text search. I’d be interested to learn if anyone has a solution for that.
Moving on from this minor annoyance, like many off-the-shelf chatbot solutions, IBM Watson Assistant is a cloud-based walled garden, but it’s quick and easy to get up and running. If I was doing this commercially for a client that had a budget, I’d probably aim to use something like OpenDialog, as there seem to be much better options there for fully owning your own code and data.
Choosing the right data for the demo
IBM Watson Discovery needs structured data, and so I chose as my non-league club to work with, Burgess Hill Town FC. Did I chose the Hillians because my daughter plays for the juniors? No I did not. I chose them because their site is built in WordPress, and well-built sites in WordPress (as this one is, by Touchline FC) generally have well-structured data which indexes well.
What might next steps be with something like this?
The video below shows the chatbot working as an overlay on my website. If you want to give it a try you may still find it live here (if the link doesn’t work it’s because I’ve pulled it, or my demo has expired).
IBM Watson Assistant has integrations for a number of chat based apps. It’s also available via the phone. Facebook Messenger is the easiest to get working quickest, but What’sApp and SMS are available (via Twilio) as well as Intercom and Slack, most of these meaning it’d be possible to integrate a fun fan engagement feature like this with other help and support options, which might combine automated and human responses, to handle ticketing or enquires for example.
Digital decisions are never a walk in the park, so please get in touch and let me help you find the right way through the technical landscape.
