Difference between IBM Watson Conversation and Natural Language Understanding

Question

I'm building an watson conversation service and I want to know different watson Conversation and Natural Language Understanding service.

I think Watson conversation service support Natural Language Understanding, such as intent, entity but Natural Language Understanding service also provide intent and entity.

If I just use intent and entity for conversation, do I need to bind Natural Language Understanding to conversation service or not?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Conversation service is separate from NLU. Conversation is about building a chatbot on your own domain. The intents/entities are only what you train it on, and the dialog is a feature only available in conversation, not NLU.

NLU is a pretrained service that returns various information back about text, but does not do anything with a response, and will give you back what it has been pretrained on. Out of the box, you can't change this. You can use a product like Watson Knowledge Studio to train a custom annotator, but NLU itself knows what it knows and thats it.

There is no need to combine these, but it is possible. Depending what problem youre trying to solve will help guide you in which you want to use. If you want to understand data about unstructured text, with no real training time required, NLU is right for you. If you want to develop a chatbot to help your users with some problem, Conversation is right for you.

If you want to build a chatbot about generic things, or if you require things like people's name, extracting locations around the world, etc, and respond accordingly, you could use NLU to extract the metadata, and then pass that to Conversation and in conjunction with your custom intents/entities/dialog have a more powerful conversation.

Answer 2

From the way I'm understanding the question, I pre-assume that you know that Watson conversation and Natural Language classifiers (NLC) are two different services provided by IBM Watson.

Watson conversation will basically help you build a chatbot or a bot (which has speech to text or vice-versa). This chatbot helps users in different ways. Let's say if a user asks a question to the chatbot, chatbot will answer accordingly (It depends on how you designed the dialogs/ or the responses) to the question asked.

Question 1: What's your name?

Answer 1: I'm Watson.

Instead, if the question was asked incorrectly.

Incorrect question : Wat is ur name?

Answer would still be: I'm Watson.

In order to build a chatbot using Watson conversation, you need to make sure that you have proper understanding of Intents, Entities, and most importantly Dialogs (Dialogs help you design the flow of the conversation). If you know these 3 parts then you are good to go with Watson conversation. There's no link between NLC and Watson conversation if you keep them isolated. *That being said, Watson conversation itself has an Natural language understanding where it could figure out User questions even if the questions are **incomplete, grammatically incorrect, mis-spelled words etc.*

In short, you need not bind anything (Natural language) to make the conversation start working. Just focus on those 3 (Intent, entities, & dialog) portions provided and you are good to go.