Watson Conversation in a live phone call

Question

Can someone show me how to use Watson Conversation and other services (e.g. Twilio) to make a live phone call and carry on a conversation?

I am able to use Watson Conversation, Twilio, and NodeRED to carry a conversation with a chatbot over SMS. I was also able to create a Watson Conversation + Watson Speech-to-Text + Watson Text-to-Speech to create a talking chatbot I could speak to in a web browser.

Twilio gives me a phone # I can use to make calls from so there must be a way to connect Watson Conversation + Speech-to-Text + Text-to-Speech + Twilio to have a live phone conversation with a chatbot.

Any examples you can point me to in order to make this connection would be helpful also.

Zeal

Answer 1

in the case, the only example I've seen is this chatbot with Slack, Facebook, Twilio, etc is Botkit, SDK from Watson Developer Cloud, see this topic please.. Botkit is a toolkit for making bot applications.

Example if you want connect with conversation and Twilio:

   var Botkit = require('botkit');

var controller = Botkit.twilioipmbot();
var bot = controller.spawn({
  TWILIO_IPM_SERVICE_SID: process.env.TWILIO_IPM_SERVICE_SID,
  TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID: process.env.TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID,
  TWILIO_API_KEY: process.env.TWILIO_API_KEY,
  TWILIO_API_SECRET: process.env.TWILIO_API_SECRET,
  TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN: process.env.TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN,
  identity: process.env.BOT_NAME,
  autojoin: true
});
controller.hears(['.*'], 'message_received', function(bot, message) {
  bot.reply(message, message.watsonData.output.text.join('\n'));
});

module.exports.controller = controller;
module.exports.bot = bot;

- How to do the integration here.

- Botkit (Github)

- One project with integration (Example SLACK).

Concordance

Botkit seems like middleware to connect watson to different channels. I used Node-RED in my case. Both seem to be limited to text messages though. I don't see where I can integrate speech-to-text and text-to-speech in them through a live call – Zeal

In the case botkit work with after and before, you see? And this call the functions, in your case, one function to call. And botkit have a function to call.. – Concordance

It is not possible to call with bots – Liturgist

Answer 2

You could try the service Voice Agent with Watson, in Bluemix. It is experimental but I think it is a matter of time that this service goes GA. And, since it is in experimental state, it is free.

https://console.bluemix.net/catalog/services/voice-agent-with-watson?env_id=ibm:yp:us-south

Aftercare

Answer 3

I don't know if it could help you, but here is an integration with API.ai instead of the Watson Bot. Voximal should support to connect most the ChatBot engines. Voximal supports native STT and TTS (most Cloud API, and of course Watson ones), you need in the VoiceXML syntax to add the ChatBot interaction (you send the Text recognized, and you receive the Text to prompt, with a tag). The Watson Bot should have a similar interaction/integration.

https://github.com/voximal/voicexml-examples/tree/master/chatbots

Influence