Conversation-with-Discovery "Exception on Query:null" - No Response from Chat App

Question

I have successfully been able to deploy and run this demo for using conversation-with-discovery.

I have spent the last 2 weeks trying to run the application with my own data, and provide a query on the Chat App localhost that I know should provide results from my data from Watson Discovery, I get the following:

http://localhost:9081/dist/index.html: "Service seems to be down.Please try again 
  after sometime or Please check the logs." "No response from Watson"

On Terminal Command Line: "10:40:03.549 [Default Executor-thread-79] 
INFO  com.ibm.watson.apis.conversation_with_discovery.discovery.DiscoveryQuery - Query: searchText:CO2 Absorption
10:40:04.360 [Default Executor-thread-79] 
INFO  com.ibm.watson.apis.conversation_with_discovery.discovery.DiscoveryClient - Creating Discovery Payload
10:40:04.361 [Default Executor-thread-79] 
ERROR com.ibm.watson.apis.conversation_with_discovery.rest.ProxyResource - Exception on Query:null"

Now if I run a query on the Local Chat App that doesn't make sense to Watson Discovery I get the following:

http://localhost:9081/dist/index.html: "Sorry I haven't learned answers to questions like this" "   "log_messages": [],
    "CEPayload": [
      {
        "text": "empty",
        "textSnippet": "empty",
        "confidence": "0.0",
        "sourceUrl": "empty",
        "title": "No results found"
      }
    ]
  },
  "input": {
    "text": "CO@""

On Terminal Command Line: "10:52:39.614 [Default Executor-thread-228] 
    INFO  com.ibm.watson.apis.conversation_with_discovery.discovery.DiscoveryQuery - Query: searchText:CO@
10:52:40.385 [Default Executor-thread-228] 
    INFO  com.ibm.watson.apis.conversation_with_discovery.discovery.DiscoveryClient - Creating Discovery Payload"

My intuition tells me that something is not right when Discovery API tries to send back a response to the Chat App via the Java application I am using but when I ask something that Discovery cannot answer I get "empty" fields for my Payload, as shown above.

Based on what I have found regarding this type of set up tried the following:

1. I changed the fields on the Java Application to match with what is shown on discovery as fields on the data schema and on the API
2. I modified the manifest.yml file: buildpack: liberty-for-java_v3_7-20170118-2046" and "env: JVM: openjdk as suggested on a few forums
3. I downloaded java-sdk-java-sdk-4.0.0 but am not sure how to update my current Java SDK. Not sure if it's the actual problem so haven't deeply approached this route.

I am running on macOS Sierra version 10.12.6. Perhaps something is incompatible with my OS?

I just need some guidance before I continue down a rabbit hole that holds no solution. Could it be the Java Application or is this an internal Java system issue on my laptop? I have searched forums and seen both situations.