Emerging features

As we write this, IBM is developing some enhancements to the Watson Assistant service that will be available by the time this book is published. These include introducing the formal concept of an assistant. In essence, an assistant represents the persona facing your user set. Often an enterprise will give their virtual assistant a name – it's essentially an extension of their company brand. The assistant concept within the service serves as an aggregation point for the things that enable the brand's identity.

Generally, an assistant has a Skill—a formal reference to the set of Intents, Entities, and Dialogs that you created in your workspace. Any assistant you create is said to have that skill. But this formalism also makes deploying your assistant easier too. For example, having created an assistant, given it a name, and associated its Skill set, the Watson Assistant tooling makes it very easy to deploy that assistant through a variety of messaging platforms, such as Facebook Messenger, Slack, or Intercom. You can initiate that by pressing the Add Integration button on the Assistant tab:

This will take you to a page that offers a variety of automated and manual integration choices to help you simplify your integration.