Course content:

This practical course is held in cooperation with IBM.

The following description was provided by IBM:

Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer science fiction, but an increasingly mainstream capability with which consumers interact daily in their homes, workplaces, and on the go. Usually known as bots, chatbots, or virtual assistants, this conversational AI makes up a crowded and confusing enterprise market, leading buyers with many “bot” versions that may not talk to each other effectively. Watson Assistant is IBM’s virtual assistant solution that allows users to interact with business systems using natural human language. IBM has married a technically robust conversational platform with developer and line-of-business-friendly tools with the breadth of the broader Watson portfolio. Enterprises can build and train the AI solution to serve a wide range of use cases across applications, devices, and channels.

The module aims are to design enterprise-specific conversational use cases and implement them using state-of-the-art frameworks of IBM Watson Assistant. You will get insights into the conversational design, natural language processing (NLP) in general and specifically in natural language understanding (NLU) and generation (NLG) as well as dialogue design. Further, you will get a glimpse into machine learning and knowledge engineering depending on the group project requirements and students preferences.

The assessment is a group project focussing in a cross-functional team on a provided or real use case and a prototypical implementation during the course. These virtual assistants aim to create and solve a real business case of real companies. They are presented and evaluated by the companies at a final presentation.