Conversations Engine

Receives user input from front-end channels

Initiates and maintains conversation sessions between the user and Watson Dialog Service

All interaction with WDS is through the WDS API wrapper on commonutils

Execution Flow

1. Receives HTTP request from channel application (Twitter, Telegram, FB, Whatsapp, etc..)
2. Validate request parameters
3. Initiate dialog (or continue dialog) - depending on request parameters received
4. Receive response from IBM WDS; and match keyword against local config
5. Distinguish static responses from dynamic responses; Publish dynamic responses to SQS queue for Requests engine
6. Publish HTTP response to channel

🚧 TO DO

1. Persist request data on DB
2. Add API authentication mechanisms
3. Add metrics for I/O points
4. Add OTP logic

Services

The service runs as a Twisted HTTP listener. Location:

#!bash

conversations/src/server

Start service:

#!bash
$ twistd -y twistd -y site-conversations.py

Stop service:

#!bash
$ kill -9 <PID>

💡 The PID is written to a twistd.pid file every time you start the service

Endpoints

The /conversation? end-point enables the client to initiate and continue conversations. There are two types of conversations: new and continuing. The type of conversation is inferred from the arguments passed in the HTTP request payload.

New conversation: To initiate a conversation, the following parameters are required: USERNAME, USER_ID, CHANNEL

Continuing conversation: To keep a conversation going, the following parameters are required: USERNAME, USER_ID, CHANNEL, INPUT

New dialog:

#!bash

$ curl -i -X POST --data "username=pythias_io&user_id=3351513075&channel=twitter" "http://52.28.87.96:9010/conversation"

Continuing dialog:

#!bash

$ curl -i -X POST --data "username=pythias_io&input=give+me+my+balance&user_id=3351513075&channel=twitter" "http://52.28.87.96:9010/conversation"

More samples on

#!bash

conversations/reference

API Client

To test the conversation server, there is a test client at:

#!bash

conversations/src/server/client.py

To run the client, invoke it with python and supply a USER_ID as the first argument and USER_INPUT as the second argument. Supply an empty string as USER_INPUT to initiate a new dialog.

#!bash

$ python client.py 2 ""
['Hello, welcome to Pythias!']

$ python client.py 2 "what is my balance?"
['You have a CURRENT ACCOUNT a\\/c number *****98801. Your balance is Ksh. 425,901', '', 'Do you have any other questions today?']

🪲 Bugs