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I am new to IBM Watson Assistant and have just run through and also modified the GitHub simple (bankbot) example. The functionality is fine as far as it goes but I would like to run a local node function and make its results available to the conversation.

An example of this might be:

A home watson node server will be started on an internet accessible ip/port.

I will chat with watson on the above ip/port and ask: "which of my home computers are up".

Somehow Watson will build an option list of all lan hosts that respond to a ping from my local node server and present them to me in the conversation.

I will choose one of them and the chosen host could be the argument of another local function.

So questions: Is there an ordained methodology to have local / cloud functions/ (variables|entities) and call/pass state back and forth between a local server and watson-assistant (Read: Not just parsing the human readable conversation JSON)

Is there an API ordained way of using the return data of local functions within the watson-conversation as options?

So far my biggest problem with Watson its naming schemes. If the above is possible and you could provide an example or api name, I can research the rest.

data_henrik
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user2856949
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2 Answers2

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In order to invoke local ("on-prem") functionality or services from IBM Watson Assistant there are a couple of options.

  1. Invoke an action (IBM Cloud Function) from within a dialog node. That action would then call out to a known API endpoint. That endpoint is your "home functionality" exposed at a cloud-accessible IP address. Note that the time for the entire roundtrip has to be below 5 seconds.
  2. Embed the chatbot into a "wrapping app" and let the app manage the call-outs. The problem of exposing your home functions is the same. The benefit to the dialog actions is that there is no time limit.
data_henrik
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You may wish to visit the Open Source project called NodeRED - which can help with the Iot / at home elements. This open source base project can be executed in the cloud (both IBM and Non IBM), on your PC, and most important on a Raspberry PI ( comes as part of the OS). You develop flows which perform as min-applications via visual programming methods. (lots of YouTube examples). There are also IBM nodes which can be used to call both into Watson Assistant, and Watson IoT etc.
You will find also lots of examples of projects developed and uploaded into the Org's library.

timd
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