Get started – Tour

Take a tour of the watsonx Assistant user interface

An easy-to-follow guide about the in-product navigation for IBM watsonx Assistant

After you've configured your first assistant, it's time to look further into the product. Take a look at an easy-to-follow guide to learn about the in-product navigation for IBM watsonx Assistant.

To see an overview, you can watch the following short video.

IBM watsonx Assistant is a Software as a Service (SaaS) virtual assistant platform that is powered by IBM Watson Natural Language Processing (NLP). Watsonx Assistant allows businesses to build and deploy chatbots and virtual assistants. With watsonx Assistant, you can design and train your virtual assistant to handle common customer inquiries, provide information, and help automate customer service and employee self-service tasks.

In conversations, watsonx Assistant uses machine learning algorithms to understand and interpret user input, allowing it match to and provide personalized responses. It can be integrated with a wide range of platforms "out of the box," including messaging apps, websites, and mobile apps, making it easy to deploy and use in various contexts. Watsonx Assistant integrates seamlessly with other IBM Watson products such as Watson Text to Speech and Watson Speech to Text for voice capabilities, and Watson Discovery for search capabilities and content analysis.

In addition to handling customer inquiries and providing information, you can also use watsonx Assistant to automate tasks such as booking appointments or processing orders. Its flexible and customizable design makes it a powerful tool for businesses looking to streamline customer interactions and improve customer service.

Key concepts

These are the constructs that are used by watsonx Assistant when building assistants in the platform. You will become familiar with them as you continue through the getting started guide.

• The watsonx Assistant Service Instance houses your Virtual Assistants (that is, chatbots).

• Each assistant knows how to have conversations based on sets of pretrained user inputs (User Examples) and chatbot responses, which are conditioned by using Steps and Variables.

• A set of User Examples, Steps, and Variables is called an Action.

• The totality of every Action, representing the entire conversation logic, can be saved as a snapshot called a Version.

• Versions get tested behind the scenes in a Draft Environment, and are published to the Live Environment when they're ready.

• After the latest Version is deployed on a Live Environment, the live, customer-facing Virtual Assistant is updated to reflect the latest Version across all channels the Live Environment is deployed on.

Summary

In this article, you've learned what IBM watsonx Assistant is, what it's used for, and the key concepts of watsonx Assistant. The next section provides information on how to get and use watsonx Assistant on IBM Cloud.

IBM watsonx Assistant is an AI-powered virtual agent that provides customers with fast, consistent, and accurate answers across any messaging platform, application, device, or channel. Using AI and natural language processing, watsonx Assistant learns from customer conversations, improving its ability to resolve issues the first time while removing the frustration of long wait times, tedious searches, and unhelpful chatbots.

With watsonx Assistant, you can build conversational interfaces into any application, device, or channel. Most virtual assistants try to mimic human interactions, but watsonx Assistant knows when to search for an answer from a knowledge base, when to ask for clarity, and when to direct someone to a human. Like a human personal assistant, the assistant you build helps your customers perform tasks and answer questions. To accomplish this, you define actions for the assistant.

This tutorial provides an easy-to-follow guide on how to sign up for an IBM Cloud Account, provision a watsonx Assistant instance, launch watsonx Assistant, and configure the settings for your first Assistant.

To see the process, you can watch the following short video.

Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial, you must have an IBM Cloud account.

Estimated time

It should take you approximately 10 minutes to complete the tutorial.

Steps

1. Go to the IBM Cloud website, and click Create IBM Cloud account in the upper-right corner of the page.

   

2. Follow the prompts to create a new IBM Cloud account. This requires that you provide your email address, create a password, select a country and region, and enter your credit card information.

   

3. If you've already purchased a subscription or have been provided a feature code, register using the code provided by selecting Register with a code.

   

4. After your account is created and verified, log in to the IBM Cloud dashboard.

   

5. From the dashboard, click Create resource in the upper-right corner of the page.

   

6. In the IBM Cloud Catalog section, type watsonx Assistant into the search bar and select watsonx Assistant from the search results.

   

7. On the Catalog page, select a location, select a pricing plan, and read and agree to the license agreements. Finally, click Create.

   

8. Wait for the instance to be created, and then click Launch watsonx Assistant to open the watsonx Assistant user interface.

   

9. You can now begin using watsonx Assistant to build and manage your chatbot. Create your first assistant by giving it an internal nickname (not visible to customers) (a), then clicking Next (b).

   

10. On the Personalize your assistant tab, answer each question to the best of your ability. Anything that you enter can be changed later, so don't worry about anything being permanent. On the final screen, click Create.

    

Congratulations! Watsonx Assistant is ready for you to build your first assistant.