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Okay so i'm a newbie and i am interning for a software company. We need to build a chatbot using Watson or Lex. But I'm not sure which one to use. Also does Lex have an engine to support automated email conversations too?

Bhavyay Arora
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    Your question might be better suited on the related product forums. Please see https://stackoverflow.com/help/on-topic for types of questions here. – Simon O'Doherty Jul 04 '17 at 15:19

5 Answers5

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If you are new to chat bots in general I would recommend to use the watson conversation service for your first chatbot. It has a graphical user interface so you can basically create your first chatbot without a single line of code (if you want to)
Additionally you can easily combine the conversation service with other AI services like natural language processing or retrieve and rank services/ machine learning services.
Based on my experience from hackathons (AWS/ Bluemix) I think that Watson conversation is the easier entry point into the topic. (faster setup - hello world app)
Bluemix Evaluation Account is 30 days for free (without credit card information - only email)

example guide:
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/cc-watson-chatbot-conversation-nlu/index.html

Bene
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I think it is "fit for purpose" choice. if you are using straight question answer kind of a bot (not too many references to data from enterprise data) use services like motion.ai. If your bot is business rule intensive and data I/O intensive, services like watson and lex are useful. They become more valuable if your firm plans to integrate other services like image recognition, language translation etc. in future. between watson and Lex, Watson has more flexible question/answer capabilities where as Lex relies on lambda functions for conversation (read a lot more coding). In our use case, Watson NLP was better than Lex. But, I am sure it could be different based on Use Case. In terms of ease of deployment, I will go with motion.ai being easiest, then watson and then Amazon lex. Hope this helps!

dude0307
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I'm not an IBMer ;-) but would also recommend the Watson Conversation service. It's easy to build a chatbot which you can then connect to via RESTful api to make integration with your website / apps relatively easy.

AWS Lex involves using two services - Lex and Lambda, which are both great and useful, but overall it's not as simple a process.

I also think the IBM code examples and API reference are more developer-friendly.

AndyOS
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Lex does not offer email integrations but you can easily create one using AWS API Gateway + AWS Lambda. Also I would recommend you to create your own benchmarking tests and see which one suits your requirements more effectively.

Saurabh
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I would go with IBM chat bot simply becuase AWS will charge you for trying to build something even if it isn't functional or good. If you want to just play around IBM is the way to go.

Austin
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