LII:Smarter Chatbots with Node-RED and Watson AI

Title: Smarter Chatbots with Node-RED and Watson AI

Author for citation: Soheel Chughtai and Emma Dawson, IBM

License for content: Unknown

Publication date: 2019

This is an IBM-created course that is released on the edX platform. The three-week course is designed to help learners use the browser-based flow editor Node-RED while integrating it with speech-to-text and chatbot applications. The course is free to take, with a Verified Certificate of completion available for $99. The course requires on average two to four hours a week of effort. Both the course and videos are in English.

The edX course description:

"In this course, you'll learn how to use Node-RED to augment the capabilities of your Watson Assistant chatbots by integrating them with services such as Watson Translate and Text to Speech. You'll also practice deployment of chatbots to Facebook Messenger.

Node-RED, which is built on Node.js, is a browser-based flow editor that makes it easy to wire together devices, APIs, and online services by simply dragging and dropping nodes on a palette. You then connect, or wire, the nodes to create flows that can be then deployed to the lightweight Node.js runtime with a single click.

Get hands-on experience in this course as you learn how to use Node-RED to augment the capabilities of your Watson Assistant chatbots. You will learn how to:

Convert speech to text
Analyze tone
Translate text into different languages
Send tweets through Twitter
Add audio and video capabilities
Set up a chatbot using the IBM Watson Assistant service and Facebook Messenger

This course requires no programming experience!"

About the authors

The edX instructors are Soheel Chughtai, Early Program Manager, IBM Watson Developer Cloud; and Emma Dawson, Early Program Manager, IBM Systems.

"Soheel runs the Early Experience Programs for Watson at IBM. His current focus is on Watson Assistant, Visual Recognition, Node-RED, and Watson Studio. Soheel also speaks multiple languages including English, French, Hindi, German, Punjabi, Russian, and Urdu."

"Emma runs the Early Experience Programs for Watson. Her main product areas are Watson Assistant, Visual Recognition, Node-RED, and Watson Studio."

General layout and contents of the course

The course is divided into an introduction, five labs, and an exam. The first lab introduces the basics of Node-RED flow, while the second gets learners involved in building a web page and working with a REST API in Node-RED. The third lab gets into the particulars of what features can be added, including text translation, tone analysis, and Twitter integration. The fourth lab introduces cognitive web pages and Messenger bots. The final lab shows learners how to "[b]uild HTML web pages that use Git repositories that can reuse browser-side JavaScript."