Extended: Manage and interact with Watson Assistant from the command line

Remember my blog posts about how to manage Watson Assistant from the command line and how to test context for a conversation? Well, that tool did not work well for server actions which I used in this tutorial on building database-driven Slackbot. The good news is that I found time to extend my command line Watson Conversation Tool to support credentials for IBM Cloud Functions.

With the recent update to the tool there are two new features:

1. Use the option "-outputonly" with the "-dialog" option to only print the output text, not the entire JSON response object. I introduced it to be able to demo dialog flows from the command line. Not everybody needs all the metadata for every dialog turn. Here is how it looks like when in action:



Chatbot dialog on the command line

2. In order to test dialog server actions, I need to provide the credentials for IBM Cloud Functions (ICF) in a private context variable. I recently blogged about how to enable the Watson botkit middleware for those server actions. For my tool, just provide the ICF key token as part of the configuration file. A sample is part of the GitHub repository.

For feature requests, defects or suggestions, open an issue or a pull request against the repository. If you have feedback, suggestions, or questions about this post, please reach out to me on Twitter (@data_henrik) or LinkedIn.