Hey guys, I am the last person saying that the Ibm implementation of a cognitive ai is not worth to explore...But I think that @JustinRatliff is very right about one thing!

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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?

We here at the forum are only but a few, and it is kind of hard to get things going if the few of us will also work to gain ground in different fields...so if there is a team going to explore what can be done with Watson, it could be a very interesting thing for the community. But on the other hand api.ai is already working perfectly with ARC and @CochranRobotics contributed some good tutorials and a sample ARC Project so everyone can get started easily!

Maybe it would be cool if we would start different threats for the two services, which contain progress being made or some examples of use and code?

I do not know about Watson, but a very tempting aspect of api.ai is also the integration of the Google Assistant...you can write your own app with can be evoked by a certain triggerphrase...for example @fxrtst could use something like...I want to talk to Alan, and this would be the entry point where Alan takes over!

Also the Google Assistant works on the Rasberry Pi, and that verson can use custom wakewords..so instead of "Hey Google" Or "Alexa" you would say "Hey Alan" to start the service, from this point on you could use all the services of the Google Assistant, plus all the apps that you coded for eg Alan!

I have encountered the same problem that @JustinRatliff mentioned, which is...there is no magic mushroom for Mario, we need to put the work in to get things done and most of us are having a day job too!

Which does not keep me from being a robot enthusiast and dreaming of my robot moving and answering my questions and telling me about the weather and not to forget that I will have to buy milk today...it's not out of reach!

@Nink That is very good work! I LOVE the look of that cardboard robot, and will check the links NOW!

@mickey666maus, you have several good points. I have to look deeper into the Googles implimentation. I think I may have looked into it at the beginning of 2017. ( did it change names to dialogflow ?), but I like the idea of taping into googles assustant and tying things together.

I’ll look into David’s examples and go from there. I have an important meeting in a couple months and want to try and implement some AI with Alan. API.ai might be the best route since it’s already working with ARC and I have a short timeline.

@fxrtst well I guess your short time line is our short time line.

I’ll further add this about Watson vs AI.api both might need in the long run because they do Not do 100% the same thing. IBM services come with that name recognition and if you were doing a deep dive of cancer research you’d use Watson not AI.api. While AI.api is used for a lot more common daily businesses interactions that are automated that we don’t think anything about. The same goes for the Microsoft Azure cognitive bot services which are very similar to AI.api.

The other challenge we constantly face is training material from a year ago or even 6 months on these services are usually dated! The thechnology changes rapidly.

But in the shortness of time I think AI.api is better if you are hoping several of us already interested will jump in and experiment and innovate along with you?

@justin, whole heartedly agree about the rate of change. It’s actually a bit scary.

In short without giving to much away at this juncture, I will be sitting on the opposite side of the table from a very big player. If this goes well I will be in an even bigger meeting with many many big hitters. The more Alan/ Alena can demonstrate themselves in a commercial use environment the better. A mock usage will be the best examples.

I will be finishing the new Alan and Alena in about two weeks and should be able to concentrate energy towards setting them up for a case study for this meeting.

Any help would be most appreciated!

@fxrtst if you’d like to send me an email at my gmail account in my profile I might be able to work with you more one to one if you’d like?

I think we all want to see your Alan and Alena be successful!

Ok will do tomorrow. Thanks.

@fxrtst Yes... api.ai was recently renamed into dialogflow, but the interface is unchanged and the integration with ARC should still work out OK!

And yes, there is a constant change, and the improvements made are worth keeping an eye on...so if there are people wanting to develop for the other cognitive services out there, it would be a very very good thing!

But dialogflow is a very easy to use and well integrated option within ARC, which also very valuable since it belongs to Google and we will not be at risk to be stuck with a dead end...

I checked the Links @Nink provided and it looks very interesting, we as DIY builders are given the chance to use the Ibm Watson service for our own projects and it seems like there will be a community growing at a good rate!

On the other hand Google released kind of the same thing a while ago... @ptp was already looking into this! It is also a Rasberry Pi with a microphone and speaker, which lets you implement agents being build and try them on your own system! It was sold out and I was not able to get one, but it should be back soon...

You'll find info about it here... https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/voice#project-overview