How to make Watson Conversation Api Invoke a web Application Url when User Enters an Input?

Question

I have a spring mvc application and I would like to make my user call a bot and the bot based on user input should access a url and based on the response provide an answer.How could I achieve this in Java?

Answer 1

There is no direct way to do it. However, Watson Conversation does provide a mechanism to handle such requests. You will need to tell the calling Java app that a url needs to be invoked.

This is done by using two features: Context.request skip_user_input

A request is a special context variable that has args, name and result. It is used to tell the calling app that it should do some action based on this variable.

Setting skip_user_input is optional. In many cases, you might want to execute some business logic in your application and then provide its results via result. Setting skip_user_input to true, will tell Watson Conversation to not wait for input from the user. Thus, your condition on the next node should be based on the content inside result.

{
  "output": {},
  "context": {
    "request": {
      "args": {
        "url_to_invoke": "your_url"
      },
      "name": "Call_A_URL",
      "result": "context.response"
    },
    "skip_user_input": true
  }
}

Answer 2

This feature is now available, with the help of IBM cloud functions. The link has the details of the implementation.