Cognitive Car Dashboard Application powered by Conversation and NLU

This application demonstrates how to integrate Natural Language Understanding (NLU) service with Watson Conversation service to extract generic entities and pass those to the Conversation service. This application is an extension of the Conversation Simple application where it adds integration to another Watson service, namely NLU as well as a third party API, namely Weather Underground API.

For more information about Conversation, see the detailed documentation.

For more information about NLU, see the detailed documentation.

To explore this application, you need to have a Bluemix account to provision the Watson services.

How the app works

The app interface is designed and trained for chatting with a cognitive car. The chat interface is on the left, and the JSON that the JavaScript code receives from the server is on the right. Your questions and commands are run against a small set of sample data trained with intents like these:

turn_on
weather
capabilities

These intents help the system to understand variations of questions and commands that you might submit.

Example commands that can be executed by the Conversation service are:

turn on windshield wipers
play music

If you say "Wipers on" or "I want to turn on the windshield wipers", the system understands that in both cases your intent is the same and responds accordingly.

Getting Started

Before you begin

1. Ensure that you have a Bluemix account. While you can do part of this deployment locally, you must still use Bluemix to provision Watson services.

2. Download and install Cloud Foundry CLI

3. Download and install Node.js and npm.

Running locally

Open a terminal on your machine and execute the following commands:

1.  mkdir convapp
2.  cd convapp
3.  git clone https://github.com/joe4k/conversation-nlu.git
4.  cd conversation-nlu
5.  npm Install  ==> installs node packages defined in package.json
6.  cp .env.example .env  ==> we define service credentials in .env file
7.  edit .env file and copy/paste the credentials for NLU, Conversation and Weather services (you will create these next).

To create Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Conversation service credentials, on your terminal window, execute the following:

1.  cf login   ==>  connects you to your bluemix account
  - API endpoint: https://api.ng.bluemix.net
  - username: your_bluemix_username
  - password:   your_bluemix_password

2.  cf create-service conversation free convapp-conv-service
 ==> create conversation using free plan and call it convapp-conv-service

3.  cf create-service-key convapp-conv-service svcKey

4.  cf service-key convapp-conv-service svcKey
 ==> returns username and password credentials for conversation service

5.  Copy the Conversation username and password to the .env file
CONVERSATION_USERNAME=username
CONVERSATION_PASSWORD=password

6.  cf create-service natural-language-understanding free convapp-nlu-service
 ==> create NLU service using free plan and call it convapp-nlu-service

7.  cf create-service-key convapp-nlu-service svcKey

8.  cf service-key convapp-nlu-service svcKey
 ==> returns apikey for NLU service

9.  Copy NLU username and password to the .env file
NATURAL_LANGUAGE_UNDERSTANDING_USERNAME=username
NATURAL_LANGUAGE_UNDERSTANDING_PASSWORD =password

To get the weather, we will rely on the Weather Underground API. To use the weather underground api, you need to sign up for an apikey. Once you get the key, edit .env file and copy the weather api key to .env file.

WEATHER_API_KEY=weatherapikey

The last piece of information we need is the WORKSPACE_ID. To get this, we need to create a workspace in our conversation service and build a conversation which involves defining intents, entities and building a dialog to orchestrate the interaction with the user. To do so:

• Point your browser to http://bluemix.net
• Login with your Bluemix credentials
• Find your conversation service with the name convapp-conv-service. Click to open the page for that service.
• Find the Launch button and click it to launch the tooling for the conversation service.
• Click Import to import a json file which defines the conversation workspace ==> Choose file convapp/conversation-nlu/training/car_workspace_nlu.json
• This imports intents, entities, and the dialog for this conversation into a workspace called NLU_Car_Dashboard.
• Click the Actions menu (3 vertical dots in top right of workspace tile) to View details.
• Copy Workspace ID, edit .env file and add workspace id WORKSPACE_ID=workspaceID

Now you’re ready to run the application. On the terminal command line, execute this command.

node server.js
Point your browser to http://localhost:3000
Experiment with conversation application
   Ask things like: “What is the weather in Austin, TX”

To push your application to Bluemix:

  edit manifest.yml and change name to a unique name (for example, convapp-conv-jk)
  cf push
  point your browser to http://convapp-conv-nlu-jk.mybluemix.net
  Experiment with conversation application
    Ask things like: “What is the weather in Austin, TX”

License

This sample code is licensed under Apache 2.0. Full license text is available in LICENSE.