nationalparks-conversation

Chatbots and Watson: Let’s talk about national parks: course source code

The chatbot uses Watson Conversation, Weather Company Data, React, Nodejs, and IBM Cloud to create a chatbot about National Parks.

The complete course content and videos lives here

Try the live demo here

Ask:

• which parks can you talk about
• Tell me about zion
• What animals live there
• What's the weather like
• What animals live at Denali National Park
• What's the weather like there

A glimpse

Prequisities

1. Clone this repo
2. Create an IBM Cloud account

Setup

Conversation

• Provision an instance of Watson Conversation on IBM Cloud
• Create a new conversation workspace by importing ./resources/conversation_workspace.json into your Watson Conversation workspaces,
• Install client and server dependencies
• Create .env files in the project root with the following contents

APP_ID=parks-conversation
PORT=3004
LOG_LEVEL=debug
SESSION_SECRET=test

WATSON_CONVERSATION_API_ROOT=https://gateway.watsonplatform.net/conversation/api
WATSON_CONVERSATION_VERSION=v1
WATSON_CONVERSATION_VERSION_DATE=2016-07-11
WATSON_CONVERSATION_USERNAME=<USERNAME>
WATSON_CONVERSATION_PASSWORD=<PASSWORD>
WATSON_CONVERSATION_WORKSPACE_ID=<WORKSPACE>

Server

Install server dependencies

npm install

Client

Install client dependencies

cd client
npm install

Build / Run (Development)

• Start the server npm start
• Start the client cd client && npm start
• Navigate to http://localhost:3000

Build / Run (Production)

cd client
npm run build
cd ..
npm start

Navigate to http://localhost:3000

Deploy to IBM Cloud

Prequisites:

• Install CloudFoundry Tools

Deploy

Follow the first 3 steps in the "Build / Run (Production)" section above, then run.

cf push USER_ID-nationalparks

Navigate to https://USER_ID-nationalparks.mybluemix.net

FAQ

Q: In Lab 5: "Programmatically interact with Watson Conversation", I get an authentication error. What do I do?

A: This occurs on Windows. Windows sets the USERNAME variable to the logged in OS user. Ultimately, it ends up overriding the value for USERNAME specified in .env. The problem can be solved in two ways:

• on step 3., hard code the USERNAME and PASSWORD e.g.

  const conversation = new ConversationV1({
    	username: 'your-username',
    	password: 'your-password',
    	version_date: ConversationV1.VERSION_DATE_2016_09_20
    });

or

• Rename the USERNAME env
  • Edit .env, change USERNAME to NP_USERNAME
  • in step 3., change USERNAME to NP_USERNAME