Home Automation Virtual Agent

Interesting approach that I had not seen .... highlighting the Watson conversation service.

Build a Home Automation Virtual Agent on Bluemix

With the home automation trend growing, have you wondered how you could build your own home automation virtual agent on Bluemix? Check out this blog post to see how a PubNub developer used PubNub BLOCKS and Watson Conversation to do it.
 by: Shyam Purkayastha

Man’s desire to be a part of the social ecosystem has led to the invention of many communication and information sharing tools. This trend is now morphing to include use cases where we interact with non-living things, as well. Let’s look at one such application where we can communicate with our things through chat, just like way we would Whatsapp our family and friends.

Home automation is an ubiquitous application. We talk to our appliances, and they obey our orders. That is so cool! But let’s take it a step further. We’ll want to make it a bit more seamless, so that we talk to our home in a natural conversation. But how do we do it? Machines talk in binary code which is cumbersome for humans. In this blog article, we will show you how to build a home automation app. So follow along and check out the demonstration provided later in this article to help you understand how to build a virtual assistant for your home. .... 

Watson Conversation service provides a drag and drop dialog builder. This dialog builder is the key to designing dialogs that are intuitive for human users and, at the same time, can be deciphered by machines.

A typical human-to-machine conversation is very different from human-to-human conversation. Machines do not usually engage in a conversation flow like we humans do. They take commands and respond with an action. The Watson Conversation service allows us to build specific dialogs that convey commands and actions between humans and machines. The image below illustrates how this is achieved via intents and entities:  .... "