@fxrtst I think that is good use case for the wit.api or probably any of the other chat bot cognitive services. So to achieve that here is the recipe:

Step 1. Have a robot with EZB and ARC with connection to robot and internet
Step 2. Create a  plugin to connect to the IBM Watson wat.api services
Step 3. Setup your individual Watson user service account
Step 4. Learn how to setup the services on the Watson cloud side of the chatbot
Step 5. Actually setup and configure chatbot on the Watson cloud side (the logic for the specific chatbot needed)
Step 6. Create scripts in ARC to query the wat.api service and return results
Step 7. Adjust your ARC scripts and Watson cloud side logic as needed to return intelligent results as it will take some fine tuning to get the results you desire. 

Now in step 7, by fine tuning I mean, (this is a hypothetical but realistic example) lets say you get everything working and you configure the robot with a ready made database about "Hotels" and then create your speech script in ARC to talk to the Watson service though a future plugin and you say, "tell me about this Hotel"...and your robot says, "You said Hotels, I like Hotels, would like to know more about Hotels?" then you, "YES!" and to your horror, it repeats, "You said Hotels, I like Hotels, would like to know more about Hotels?"

That's when you know you need to revisit the logic on the Watson side of your service setup. Because it would indicate you did not interconnect some of the logical functions of the available services correctly to produce what you wanted.

This "recipe" would be the same for any of the major chatbot cognitive services like ai.api from google or any of the others.

I agree Justin I have test more Watson conversation services and it is a little bit worst than api ai Pick up forward or look forward make jd go forward We call that artificial intelligence or machine learning....

I prefer To invest in my synbot programmed intelligence.

I'd like to add going back to my "Mario eating the mushroom to get big" analogy because we've had ai.api for a while but I don't think a lot of us have used it very much because we have to know how to configure it on the services side.

Looking at just the ai.ap service, there is training available but training takes time and training sources from google and other sources are not going to be specifically geared toward what most in the EZ-Robot community would probably want to see. A lot of the training is geared towards, for example making an intelligent chat agent on Facebook with a text chat interface. Now you might think "Ok, I can take that and instead of Facebook, direct the chat to EZ-Robot" - but, you'd be wrong, the services don't reconfigure as easily as you would think without a fair amount of knowledge.

And we all are draw towards different cognitive/chat services which means our time and resources are divided, which by all means everyone should use what they want to, I'm just pointing out our chatbot creation work is divided and I don't know if that divided work has been fruitful?

So far my interest and time has been in ai.api. I have a "day job" interest in this service as well.

If there is going to be a team of sorts to collaborate on really getting Watson working with ARC and get the knowledge out to show how to get a chat service working where a team share the work I'm totally in!

One method to move forward is sign up for an IBM cloud account and use the IoT services with MQTT to connect EZB to the IBM cloud. https://console.bluemix.net

Once we get EZB connected the rest should be fairly straight forward and we can even use node red to link to watson API’s.

@Nink can you give us a tutorial or video on how to do that to get the ball rolling?

@NInk, It sounds like you have some understanding here. Can you elaborate? This is an interesting subject and I would like to learn.

@justin, thanks for elaborating. That was my understanding on how all the services worked. I’ve downloaded and poked at a few services and they all seem to be very similar in function and setup. The deep learning side (AI) is what I find fascinating and I’m not sure who’s service is the best and or easiest to set up. I think Watson has had the most coverage publically with their commercials and exposure with Watson on Jeopardy but, doesn’t necessarily make it the right choice...or does it?!?

@nink, I agree it’s worth exploring.

I think it might be benificial to expand and discuss on user experiences on any of the services that are offered (AI.api, synbot, Watson etc. ).

@perry_s @JustinRatliff I have played with the API's and have also built a Raspberry Pi Based TJBOT. Cardboard Robot that connects to Watson chat services. You can find all about him here. http://www.research.ibm.com/tjbot/ and the instructables are here (you can also 3d Print him) http://www.instructables.com/member/TJBot/ He is actually fun to make and play with. Most makers will have all the parts except the pesky NeoPixel LED's but you can get them from Adafruit.

I also followed along with Bob Dills Zero to cognitive course about 8 months ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj7IFjd3FyI It has all changed now and a lot of the pieces in the tutorial no longer work out of the box but it is a good starting point as well.