Monday, August 1, 2016

Create a Slack ChatBot using the new IBM Watson Conversation service

IBM has just released a new Watson service called Conversation, available on IBM Bluemix.  Conversation is a service that allows you to add a Natural Language interfaces to your applications to simulate conversations with your end users using Watson's cognitive capabilities.  There are a lot of uses for this service, but one I thought would be fun to prototype is a chat bot integrated with an instant messaging client.  You can find out more about the new IBM Watson Conversation service here: https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/conversation.html

For the chat client, I decided on Slack because it provides a very rich set of integration APIs.  Specifically, Slack has the built in ability to create a custom bot that can be used within your team channels.  It also has the ability to distribute that bot to other teams, but that is a more advanced topic I will not cover in this post.  Instead of describing all the technical aspects of the Slack APIs, I will instead demonstrate how to use them with a practical example of building a Slack bot that your team can converse with using the Watson Conversation service as the backend logic for conducting the conversation with the bot.

So what type of bot to create?  Well, there is no shortage of ideas out there that's for sure.  Even Taco Bell has gotten into the game by creating their own Slack bot for ordering their food (https://www.tacobell.com/feed/tacobot).  What a great idea for those developers so busy that they just don't have any time to stop coding to go order food :)  So in the spirit of this, I will create a very simple bot to simulate a conversation about ordering food to demonstrate one potential way of using the Conversation service.

Let's first start simple, and build a very rudimentary Slack bot that does only one thing by responding generically to any message that is sent to it.  Once we've laid out how to integrate a bot with Slack, then we can move on to integrating that bot into the Conversation service to simulate food ordering.

Our first step in creating our own team bot is to go to the Slack team's setting page and make sure you are logged into the correct team (especially if you belong to multiple domains), and then create a new bot user by going to this URL and selecting a name in all lowercase: https://my.slack.com/services/new/bot


This will result in an integration settings page where you can optionally customize more aspects to your bot, including giving the bot an icon, first and last name, etc.  Most notably though is the API Token that you will need to keep private and use later for integration.



Integration with Slack and giving the bot the ability to communicate with other users is accomplished through the Real Time Messaging (RTM) API (https://api.slack.com/rtm).  This WebSocket-based API is able to authenticate with Slack, receive events, and send messages to users in real time.  The previous link shows the many types of events that your bot can respond to.  There is some API gymnastics required if we coded this integration from scratch.  But since others have already done a lot of the hard work associated with the API integration, let's use that and focus our attention on the overall integrated example.  In this case, we will use a node.js based toolkit for integrating with the Slack APIs.  I choose Botkit (https://howdy.ai/botkit/) since it is very well done and complete with a lot of examples and good instructions (https://github.com/howdyai/botkit/blob/master/readme.md).

Let's first start by installing Botkit locally with the following command (note, if you don't already have node.js installed, then hop on over to http://nodejs.org to download a package that will install both node and npm):

$ npm install --save botkit

Now using Botkit, we need to create our bot logic in node.js.  Let's start with something extraordinarily simple, the classic hello world.  First, we need to add the necessary setup code by requiring the Botkit toolkit, and then we create a controller that we will use to interact with Slack:

var Botkit = require('botkit');
var controller = Botkit.slackbot({ debug: false });

Once we have the controller, we can spawn our bot and connect the bot to the stream of messages coming from Slack (via the Real Time Messaging API).  Replace the token with the token you generated earlier so that it can be authenticated with the RTM API:

var bot = controller.spawn({ token: '<your_token>' }).startRTM();

Now, we simply want the bot to listen for the word "hello" by a direct message and reply back "Hello World".  This is accomplished by registering a listener as follows:

controller.hears(
   'hello',
   ['direct_message'],
   function(bot, message) {
      bot.reply(message, 'Hello World');
});

Save this Javascript code to a file called "foodbot.js" and run it in node on the command line:

$ node foodbot.js

Assuming you do not get any errors, you should be able to navigate over to your Slack client and direct message your new bot (note, if you do have errors, you can enable debugging by changing the parameter passed to the controller to true):


In this example, we are instructing the controller to listen for the word "hello" and only respond to that text while ignoring other messages.  We can use any regular expression pattern we want for the listener, so this can be very useful in building a bot where all the business logic is contained in this one service.  However, since we will be connecting this bot to the Watson Conversation service, we would like to just provide a pass through of any messages.  Let's change the line to the following which will allow the bot to respond to any message sent to it:

controller.hears(
   '(.*)',
   ...

Now let's turn our attention to how we can use the Conversation service on IBM Bluemix.  Go ahead and log into your Bluemix (http://bluemix.net) account and navigate to the dashboard and filter down to Watson services.  Then select the Conversation service and create it with all the defaults:


Before we get started, let's talk a bit about what the Conversation service can do.  As I mentioned earlier, this service allows you to add natural language interfaces to your applications to automate interactions with end users, exactly what we want to do with our Slack food bot.  It does this through 3 very simple concepts:

1. Intents.  You first need to train Watson to understand your user's input with example utterances.  You do that by declaring an "Intent" and giving examples of that intent.  For example, in our food bot, an intent can be to "place an order".

2. Entities.  You then need to define what are the things that the user will be trying to interact with.  You do that by declaring an "Entity" and provide terms that may vary in your users' input.  For example, in your food bot, an entity can be "pizza" that you want to order.

3. Dialog.  Now that you have the basic building blocks of a conversation, you can use the provided dialog builder to build a flow of how the service will create responses to your user's input.

This is all best understood through an example, so let's go ahead and get started.  Of course a dialog flow could get pretty complicated, but let's just do something very simple to demonstrate the basics.  Let's say that a user can ask to order one of two food items for now, a "pizza" or a "sandwich".

The basic flow looks like this.  User sends the food bot the message "Place an order for food".  The bot responds to the user clarifying food options "You can order a pizza or a sandwich".  The user can now respond with either option, e.g. "Pizza" or "Sandwich".  If the user asks for something not available, then we want the response to again ask for either the pizza or sandwich.  Very simple, but enough to show the integration we intended.

Once you launch the Conversation tool in Bluemix, the first step is to create a Workspace.  This is a way to maintain separate intents, entities, and dialogs for each application.  For this example, I will call my Workspace "FoodBot".  Once the Workspace is created, there will be a "Get Started" button to launch the tool to start creating Intents.

Go ahead and create your first Intent, give it the name "#order_food".  Then it will ask you for some User examples.  These are example of how you expect users to interact with this intent.  For example, a user might say "I want to order food", or "Place an order for a pizza".  Let's add more examples to this intent:



A more typical intent would have a much broader amount of examples, but this is good enough for now to train Watson on the basic things a user might say.

Now, let's create our Entities.  Since we have just this simple example, where the user is only ordering food, we only need one.  Let's name it "@food" and give it the two options: Pizza and Sandwich.  For each option, we will add a couple synonyms, so that for example if the user asks for a Sandwich or a Sub, either will be recognized.


And lastly, let's create the dialog flow.  In this simple example, we first add the intent "#order_food".  If that isn't recognized, then "Anything else" will kick in and ask the user what they want.  Then we add a child dialog and make it recognize any food, and respond with confirmation that their food has been order repeating the food item.  If the food entity is not recognized, then we default to the "true" condition, and which instructs the user as to which food items can be ordered.  Lastly, since we want to give the user the option to say the whole order in one sentence, verses needing to prompt what type of food, we have to add the "Continue from..." condition as show in the dialog flow here:



And you can see from the "Try it out" panel on the right side, that we get the answers we were expecting based on the dialog flow we created.

Now that we have a Conversation instance set up and ready to take commands, let's turn our attention back to integrating our original Slack Food bot with this conversation instance.  The API documentation for the Watson Conversation service can be found here ( http://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/conversation/api/v1/ ) although note that we are using V1 of the API and that will obviously change sometime soon.

To make sure we can interact with the Conversation API, let's first start simple and use CURL ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CURL ) from the command line to send our API commands.  The first command we will make is simply to verify we get an appropriate response.  So we need to issue the following from the command line:

$ curl -X POST -u "<username>":"<password>" -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d "{}" "https://gateway.watsonplatform.net/conversation/api/v1/workspaces/<workspace_id>/message?version=2016-07-11"

A couple things to note.  You first have to replace the username and password highlighted above with the credentials you use for your Conversation instance.  These are not your Bluemix credentials.  Instead, go to your Conversation instance, and select "Service Credentials" from the left hand navigation as shown here:


Secondly, you need to replace the workspace_id with your actual workspace ID for your Conversation instance.  You can find that by by first launching the Conversation tool.  Then select the "..." ellipsis from the Workspace and select "View details"


Notice that in the CURL command you are issuing, there is empty brackets as input for the POST.  This is because the Conversation service expects a JSON formatted input that we will provide later.  For now issue this command, and you should get back a JSON response like this:

{"context":{"conversation_id":"<conversation_id>","system":{"dialog_stack":["root"],"dialog_turn_counter":1,"dialog_request_counter":1}},"intents":[],"entities":[],"input":{},"output":{"log_messages":[],"text":["Would you like to order a pizza or a sandwich?"],"nodes_visited":["<node_id>"]}}

There are a couple important things to note in this response.  First, the service responds with a "context" which has a conversation ID that you can use to continue the conversation if you desire, and a "system" object which provides information about the dialog.  Because we provided no input, the service just responds with our catch all phrase "Would you like to order a pizza or a sandwich?".

Ok, let's take this and see if we can hook together our node.js code integrated with the Slack API to make this request to the Conversation service.  So first to make this easier, let's use the third party node module "request" which was built to make it very simple to make HTTP(S) calls.  Install it on your command line with the following command to the package manager:

$ npm install request

Now add the following require code to your node.js file:

var request = require('request');

And replace the line we created earlier:

bot.reply(message, 'Hello World');

With these lines of code:

function(bot, message) {
  request({
    auth: {
      username: '<username>',
      password: '<password>'
    },
    method: 'post',
    json: true,
    url: '<service_URL>',
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': 'application/json'
    }
  },
  function (error, response, body) {
    if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
      console.log('BODY: ', body);
    }
  }).end('{}');
});

What this code does is use the request module to do the POST method to the Conversation API.  First we need to specify the options for our request, including the "username" and "password" from before, as well as the URL we used in the CURL command (which included your workspace ID).

First stop your node.js service and start it again (you will need to do this any time you make a code change).  Now, when you message your bot in Slack, you should see a response in your node command window from the Conversation service like we did when we used CURL directly.  For example:

$ BODY: {
    context: { 
      conversation_id: '<conversation_id>',
      system: {
        dialog_stack: [Object],
        dialog_turn_counter: 1,
        dialog_request_counter: 1 } },
    intents: [],
    entities: [],
    input: {},
    output: { log_messages: [],
     text: [ 'Would you like to order a pizza or a sandwich?' ],
     nodes_visited: [ '<node_id>' ] } }

Now we want to extract the text from the output so we can have our bot reply with that text response in Slack.  So let's replace the code snippet:

console.log('BODY: ', body);

With the following which takes the first text response from the output:

bot.reply(message, body.output.text[0]);

Go ahead and message your Slack bot (after restarting the node.js service), and it should respond with the appropriate message from the Watson Conversation service:


Looks good so far, but upon further inspection this is not exactly what we want.  Because our node code doesn't actually simulate a conversation, so you will get this response no matter what you type in.  What we really need is for the code to first call the Conversation service to get the generic response as well as provide us a conversation id, so that we can actually continue the dialog with the service.  All the details for the format of the request expected, and the response given,  by the Conversation API are detailed in the documentation link I provided earlier.  So for now I will just show you the code that we need to 1) start the dialog with Conversation service, and then 2) make a second request to the Conversation service with the input from the user as well as the conversation id and some other information regarding the request counter, etc.  Given the need to make 2 Conversation API calls now, this is an opportunity for me to modularize the code into reusable functions.  Here is the completed code example:

var Botkit = require('botkit');
var request = require('request');
var controller = Botkit.slackbot({ debug: false });
var bot = controller.spawn({ token: '<your_token>' }).startRTM();

var username = '<username>';
var password = '<password>';
var workspce = '<workspace_id>';

var url = 
  'https://gateway.watsonplatform.net/conversation/api/v1/workspaces/' + 
  workspce + 
  '/message?version=2016-07-11';

// Gets the first text from an array of potential responses.
function getResponseText(params) {
  for (i = 0; i < params.length; i++) {
    if (params[i]) return params[i];
  }
  return "";
}

// Calls the Watson Conversation service with provided request JSON.
// On response, calls the action function with response from Watson.
function callConversationService(json, action) {
  request({
    auth: {
      username: username,
      password: password
    },
    method: 'post',
    json: true,
    url: url,
      headers: {
        'Content-Type': 'application/json'
      }
    },
    function (error, response, body) {
      if (!error && response.statusCode == 200) {
        action(body);
      }
  }).end(json);
}

// Register to listen for any user communication with bot.
controller.hears(
  '(.*)',
  ['direct_message'],
  function(bot, message) {      
    callConversationService('{}', function (resp) { 
      
      var conv_id = resp.context.conversation_id;
      
      var req_json = 
        '{\"input\":{\"text\":\"' + 
        message.match[1] + 
        '\"},\"context\":{\"conversation_id\":\"' + 
        conv_id + 
        '\",\"system\":{\"dialog_stack\":[\"root\"],\"dialog_turn_counter\": 1,\"dialog_request_counter\": 1}}}';
            
      callConversationService(req_json, function (resp2) {
        
        var txt = getResponseText(resp2.output.text);
        bot.reply(message, txt);
      });
  });
});

Let's break this code down a bit and describe what it's doing.  I register to listen for any user communication though Slack to the Food bot.  Then the code calls the Conversation service with an empty "{}" JSON request just to start the dialog and get back a conversation ID.  Then a new JSON request is constructed, this time providing the message the user gave to the bot, as well as context information needed to pass to the Conversation service (see details in documentation for each parameter).  Then the Conversation service is called once again passing this JSON request, and as a result, the Conversation service reply is located in the response and then sent to Slack to present to the user.  Note, that the Conversation service returns an array of responses, some of which might be empty due to the nature of the conversation, thus a function was created to get the first non-empty textual response.

This is a pretty simple example, and if you wanted to have an example that had more dialog with the user and the Conversation service, than this code example would need to be enhanced to make that possible since this code simulates the conversation with the Conversation service in a single message to the bot, instead of saving state and allowing the user to go back and forth in a dialog with the Conversation service.  But I'll leave that to you as a homework assignment ;-)

Lastly, we can see our code in action by interacting with the Food bot in Slack as shown here:

13 comments:

  1. Congratulations excellent tutorial is possible run an external script after the answer "Okay, I ordered your @food." type myscript.sh?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Watson Conversation service does not provide a framework for running external scripts. Instead, that logic would need to be contained in your own application.

      Delete
  2. Yeap, I'm having difficulty executing script after interacting with Watson, could help implement something using this project

    middleware.after = function(message, conversationResponse, callback) {
    callback(null, conversationResponse);
    }

    https://github.com/watson-developer-cloud/botkit-middleware/blob/master/examples/multi-bot/app.js

    ReplyDelete
  3. HI Mike, would it be possible for the watson to give a handoff to the slack platform when Watson's response confidence level goes below 0.7? In other words, while a user is chatting with Watson and at a point where watson cannot respond with high confidence score then, can it send that user's message to slack. So that, one of the human agent can take over and start responding from slack platform to the user who is still on the watson service application.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I really enjoyed reading your blog.I look forward to reading more of your insights about IBM watson

    ReplyDelete
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