Ensure that the classroom has a computer with internet access and that the room has PowerPoint presentation capabilities
After your introduction, walk through the PowerPoint directions in the presentation slides with the class. Ensure you are engaging students throughout by asking for their input and calling on students to make decisions about what to create. We recommend starting with the Customer Care Sample Skill to review what Intents, Entities and Dialogues are with the students - please note you can only use one Skill on an assistant at a time.
After you explore the site with the students, we recommend you asking the class to create an imaginary business that they want their chatbot to support. This could be any business that deals with questions from customers. Some ideas include a clothing store, an auto body shop or an energy company. Then, keeping this imaginary business in mind, create your own Skill. We recommend starting with a skill like "Directions," or "Store Inventory."
Click "Create dialog skill" and then click "Intents." This is where you will define the purpose of why a customer might be seeking assistance. You may want to use something like #stock_levels to indicate what your business has in stock. Then create a description and enter some examples of what a customer might type in if they want to find out if a store has certain items. Be sure to ask the students for their input! Once you have created your "Intent," return to the previous screen and then follow the onscreen steps for "Entities" - this is very similar to creating an Intent. We recommend making a few of each so you have lots to work with when you start to create the chatbot responses. Make sure to keep students engaged by asking them to think deeply about what the customer of their imagined business might want out of this chatbot.
After you have created your Intents and Entities, click "Dialog" to write your chatbot responses. Click "Add node" and enter the information like the example provided below.
Test your chatbot! In the top right corner of the screen, click "Try it" and see your chatbot come to life! Enter different queries based off of your Intents and Entities and see how your chatbot responds. Remember to point out how Watson learns - even if you don't put an exact query into your Intents and Entities, the chatbot may still give the right information. Note how you can see the information Watson is using to produce the answer and that if the chatbot is wrong, you can correct it to help it avoid future mistakes.
Be sure to direct students to Open PTECH, a free online learning platform, to encourage them to continue learning about relevant technology topics like machine learning and AI.
