Mikel Amigot | IBL News (New York)
IBM launched yesterday on edX.org a free course to learn how to create a turbocharged chatbot with Watson Services.
The online class (3 weeks, 2-4 hours per week) teaches the intricacies of Watson Discovery, allowing to surface answers and patterns from large unstructured data sets.
Designed for intermediate learners, this practical course, Programming Chatbots with Watson Services, requires learners to have previous basic knowledge of object-oriented programming, as well as command line, Node.js, and IBM Watson Assistant.
In addition, “if you have a large repository, the contents of which could answer customer questions, you’ve got the makings of a great FAQ chatbot,“ said the instructors of the course – four IBM’s developers and cloud experts.
The AI-powered chatbot application, that interacts in natural language, is the result of ingesting data that can be queried to extract sentiment, concept, entities, and taxonomy by using Watson Discovery.
WordPress and edX Plugins
AI-based agents or chatbots are expanding in all the industries including education. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85% of businesses will have their own chatbot.
In digital education, many questions on the discussions, especially the repetitive ones that pop up in every class, can be answered by a chatbot. Inquiries and follow-up requirements within the course can be solved by this type of automatic help desks.
These IBM agents are now created for the overall course catalog, rather than the use of a Teaching Assistant (TA) for individual courses and pedagogical answers.
- Today, IBM is considering developing a Watson-based extension or plugin to integrate with edX.org and Open edX sites, sources told toIBL News.
- In September, IBM issued a plugin for WordPress, that uses Watson’s Assistant on the cloud. This plugin helps to quickly deploy a chatbot on WordPress-based sites.
- In July, IBM released another related course on edX.org, titled, “How to Build Chatbots and Make Money’.Most of these courses have already been released through IBM’s Open edX-based learning platform, Cognitive Class.
