Building a AI Budget Bot for Planning Analytics with Watson Assistant in 20 Minutes

Key Takeaways

tired of the long hours is your budget driving you insane you need a budget pod what's happening guys my name is nicholas renate and in this video we're going to be building our very own budget bot specifically we're going to be using watson assistant and planning analytics to do it let's take a greater look in detail as to what we're going to be going through so in this video we're going to cover how to set up web hooks that interact with watson assistant and planning analytics we'll also build a budget bot that allows us to load commentary from our watson assistant bot all the way through to planning analytics and last but not least we'll actually test it out and load some commentary direct into our planning analytics cube now in terms of how we're going to be doing it we're going to be training our intents and entities within watson assistant then we're going to be using ibm cloud functions as webhooks to interact with our planning analytics bot and last but not least we're going to be pushing all of our commentary into our planning analytics general ledger queue ready to do it let's get to it so in this video we're going to be setting up a budget bot so specifically we're going to be able to use a bot enter in our account a cost center a project and a whole bunch of other good stuff and we're going to be able to pass through a comment to a budgeting tool so in this case the budgeting tool that we're going to be using is planning analytics and you can see we've got a comment there already and we're going to leverage a web hook so if you haven't set up a serverless web hook for planning analytics already i'd highly suggest you go and check out that video the link will be i don't know somewhere around here so check that out and then we can get up and running so there's a couple of things we need to do today so first up we need to enable our webhook as an action this is going to allow our bot and specifically what's an assistant to go and reach out to it then we need to set up what's an assistant which is going to be really quick and easy set up our skills so this is going to be where all of our budgeting knowledge is stored within what's an assistant set up our intents to work out what we're actually asking our bot set up our entity set up our dialogue and then test it out so let's kick things off and get our web hook set up as an action so in order to do this you just need to go to cloud.ibm.com forward slash functions and then from there just hit actions so this is going to be where all your web hooks are stored from that previous video so if you've gone and set that up you should still have your web hook available in here and the web hook that we set up in that video was called pa serverless so if we just step into pa serverless all we need to do here this is really easy just go to endpoints and select enable as a web action so you can see that there and hit save and that's really it now what we're going to need is this a line here so if we just wait till that's finished saving and you can see it's now saved we can copy that and we'll just save that here so this web hook that we've just grabbed here this is going to be what we pass through to what's an assistant to enable us to reach out to our planning analytics service now what we need to do is so we can mark this as done actually now what we need to do is set up our watson assistant service so in order to do that we just need to go to cloud.ibm.com forward slash catalog and then if you select services then choose ai machine learning so down here and then choose what's an assistant so there's a bunch of pricing plans for now you can set up the light plan more than enough to get started and we should be able to set up our budget bot through that so select light down here choose your region you can change your region if you want to and hit create and once that's finished creating you'll be taken to a manage page which you can see up here and then from there all you need to do is hit launch watson assistant and we can just close this tutorial and step back and hit done cool so that's our assistant set up so we can now mark that as done as well now the next thing that we need to do is actually set up our assistant and create a skill so in order to do that we just need to hit create assistant and in this case we're going to call it budget bot and hit create assistant down there and then we need to create a skill so a skill is basically going to encapsulate all the knowledge that we have to do with our budgeting so from here to create a skill all we need to do is hit add dialogue skill then select create skill so you can see you've got add existing skill create skill use sample skill and import skill we just need to hit create skill so by the way all the assets for this video are going to be available in a github repo in the description below so if you want to import the skill you'll be able to do that as well in this case we're going to hit create skill and we're going to call it budgeting skill uh leave the description blank you can add something if you want uh language is fine and then hit create dialogue skill so from there you can see that our skill is now created and we can step into that and now what we're going to do is start setting up our intents and our entities so before we do that let's just check our to-do list so we've now started setting up our skill now we're going to start setting up our intents setting up our entities and then eventually we're going to set up our dialogue so the first thing that we want to do is setting up our intent so you can see here a an intent is a collection of statements that have the same meaning basically an intent is really going to be used as a trigger for what we want our bot to do so in this case we want an intent to trigger whether or not we want to load commentary or load a budget or load something into planning analytics so in this case the intent that we're going to set up is going to be mainly around load commentary so let's go ahead and create an intent and we're just going to call it uh load commentary so that's our intent name up here now what we need to do is actually include some utterances so an utterance is basically just a fancy name for an example of an intent so in this case the examples that we're going to include are enter commentary and the cool thing is if you hit try it out here you're going to see that our watson assistant bot is training in real time so um so if we enter in enter commentary uh load commentary and then uh load comments that should be enough for now so once this is finished training you'll see this purple box go all right so we've got a couple examples of utterances ideally you should have five we're just going to include three and you can see here that we're getting our pro tip that's saying use at least five unique examples to help watson understand so we're just gonna leave it as three for now just to make things quick but you can add more if you'd like all right so those are our intents done and you can see our watson assistant bot is training now what we want to do is go and set up our entities so our entities are going to store our enterprise knowledge so they're going to be our nouns and our keywords and specifically here they're going to be our accounts our cost centers our versions and our projects so let's go on ahead and set some of these up so the first one that we want to set up is an account entity so let's create create entity and in this case we're going to call it account hit create entity and again we just need to include some examples so in this case we're going to include account one two three one two three one and add that value to one two three one two three two add that value and again these are just accounts that we've got within our planning analytics service all right so that's three that we've got there now we need to go and do the exact same thing for our cost center our month our project and our version so let's go on ahead and smash through that alrighty so those are all of our entities done so you can see here we've set up one for our account one for our cost center one for our month project and version and in this case we've just included examples that we're likely to find within our planning analytics budgeting tool so let's quickly take a look at our to-do list so we've now set up our intents and we've also set up our entities now what we need to do is set up our dialogue and as part of that we need to set up our web hook so let's copy this web hook that we just grabbed here and let's step back in so in order to set up our web hook we just need to go into options and you can see that we've got this url here we just need to paste in our web hook into there and that's our web hook done now what we can do is start setting up our dialogue so whenever you set up a dialogue you've got the ability to add a node add a child node and add a folder so the first thing that we're going to do is go ahead and add a node and this first node is basically going to detect our intent so remember we set up that intent which was to do with loading commentary so if we choose our intent you can see that we're basically going to have all our intents available and what we're basically saying is if our assistant recognize our load commentary intent then it's going to do whatever's in this node so we might choose to say we've recognized uh commentary intent and then if we go and test that out on our assistant so if we type in load commentary so down here you can see that we've detected our commentary intent and we've also responded appropriately so with our text that we had here but what we actually want to do is kick off a bit of a process to collect all the different pieces of information to push to our planning analytics service and we can do that using slot so if we actually hit customize and choose slots this is going to allow us and hit apply down here this is going to allow us to ask for multiple pieces of information or check for multiple pieces of information and specifically we want to check for these different entities that we've got here so count our cost center a month our project and our version so if we go back to our dialogue and what we're going to do here is we're going to create a slot for each piece of information that we need to load our budget so in this case we're going to need our account our cost center our month our project and then some of them we're going to hard code so let's go on ahead and start setting this up so first up we want to check if we've got a specific entity so for example what we can do within the check for input field is select into that and you can see we're going to get a filter so if we choose our entity the first thing that we want to check for is an account so if we've got an account saved then what we want to do is save our account as a variable and this is going to allow us to use that variable later and if it's not present then we want to prompt our user so we might say which account and now what will happen is if we go and trigger this again so if we type in load commentary it's prompting us for which account so we might then say two one two three one two three one and you can see we've now detected our account and we've also gone and responded appropriately but more importantly if we actually go to our context you can now see that we've stored that account so we're going to do the same thing for all the other pieces of the information that we need so we're going to do it for our cost center our month our project and our version so to do that we just need to add in a couple of extra slots so we're going to need five and then we're just going to create one per entity so those are our slots done so we've got one for an account one for a cost center one for a month one for a project and last but not least one for a version now if we go and try this out so if we type in or if we clear our context and type in load commentary you can see it's prompting for our account so if we give it our account first it's asking for our cost center it's asking for our month then asking for our project so we'll type in bau it's asking for our version so we'll type budget and you can see that because it's got everything so it's got our account it's got cost center it's got month it's got project it's got version it's now responding with this piece of text here but what we actually wanted to do is then ask for our piece of commentary and then send it out to our web pool so now what we're going to do is go on ahead and set that up and just for reference if you select manage context up here you're going to see all of those context variables set so we can see our account our cost center a month our project and our version now what we need to do is ask for that piece of commentary so we're going to close this for now and we're going to delete this response here and then what we're going to do is we're going to add a child node so we can hit add child node and again we're going to detect whether or not we've loaded commentary and now what we're going to do is ask what is the comment and what we want our commentary node up here to do is automatically jump to this node once we've collected all of our different entities so we can do that by selecting this load commentary node and down here rather than waiting for our reply let's just make sure we've got that deleted rather than waiting for our reply we can hit jump this node here and then what we're going to do is rather than waiting for user input or whether or not we've recognized the condition what we're going to do is choose respond so this is basically going to get our assistant to jump from here automatically to this node and ask us what is the comment so we can go and try that out so again we can type in load commentary as our intent it's going to ask us which account so again we can pass through all of the pieces of information so this is one of the cool things about slots so rather than passing through one piece of information at a time to one account one cost center and so on you can actually pass them all through in a single statement so that will capture all of it so let's pass through our account our cost center our version which is going to be budget our project our month and you can see it's now prompting us for what the comment is so it's captured all of our different entities our account our cost in our version our project in our month now we can type in whatsapp comment it's not going to do anything after that because we haven't actually set up anything but let's type something in and because we haven't set up anything after that it's just responded with i didn't understand you can try rephrasing but now what we actually want to do is capture that comment and store it within our context and then go off and trigger our web hook so let's first close this uh panel here so before we create our commentary capture node what we want to do first is set up a new context variable so in order to do that just select these three little dots up here next to assistant response and open our context editor and what we're going to do is type in intent and commentary and the reason that we're going to do that is we're going to look for this intent in our next node so again let's add a child node and what we're basically going to do here is detect our intent and we're going to check if it equals commentary and if we've detected that commentary intent then we're going to capture our comment so we can again do that by opening up our context editor and setting our comment variable or creating a comment variable and then what we want to do is use some spell so it's it's a specific syntactic language to detect our comment within our assistant and we can grab that using our input dot text and put that in quotes and this is basically going to grab our input from our last statement as our comment so when we enter in our comment in this note here it's going to grab that input dot text now what we want to do again is we want to jump to this node as well so what we're going to do is select this node and again rather than waiting for our reply we're going to jump to this node and we're going to wait for our user input so what should now happen is we'll trigger our load commentary node will then capture our comment and then we'll have our comments stored within our context from this node so if we go and try it out so we type in load commentary we'll type in our account so again we'll just pass through everything in one go and again we're getting prompted for our comment so again if we check our context we've got our account our cost center a month our project our version and our intent now so keep in mind it's now detecting our intent now what we can do is pass through our comment and now if you take a look our context has increased as well and you can see that we're capturing our comment perfect so it's captured our comment now all that's left to do is actually go and send our data to planning analytics using our web hook so let's first up just close this and close this and what we're going to do is choose our load commentary node and again add a child node and what we want to do is only trigger this if we detect that we have a comment so we can type in dollar comment and it's going to trigger based on that and we actually only ever want to go to this node after we've gone through this entire process here so what we can do is go back into our intent equals commentary node and select jump to this node and we want to respond automatically so we're going to evaluate our responses now from this node here this is going to be our webhook node and from there this is where we can actually go and send our data into planning analytics so in order to configure this we just need to hit customize and then hit our toggle for call out to web hooks there and hit apply and you can see that we're going to have this ability to add in all these parameters here now there's a bunch of parameters that we actually need to add in and these are all the parameters that we want to send to planning analytics so a month our value account project so on and so forth so let's go ahead and set up these [Music] parameters all right so those are our parameters set up so what we've done is we've set up one two three four five six seven eight nine parameters and each one of these corresponds to a dimension or value within our planning analytics cube so you can see here that we've got our month we've got our comment our account project version and we've also hard coded some of these variables as well so for example we're just going to be sending to our local currency node and we're also only going to be sending to our base source and our commentary measure so the last two things that we need to do i just set up a response so we're basically going to say either commentary successfully loaded or error something happened so we can now go and test this out so basically what's going to happen is we'll trigger our load commentary node up here so this will detect our intent we'll then prompt for our comment save our comment and then send our web hook so let's go on and try that out so let's clear all of this so now we want to load commentary we can pass through all of our values then type in our comment so then this will go and reach out to our web hook and hopefully load this into planning analytics and you can see that we've read out comment is successfully loaded so if we go back into our planning analytics cube to this intersection here so account two million and one cost center 1001 or 100 0001 so if we go back grab that cost center grab that account and we've got the right version and let's just make sure that we've got the right project and we've got the right month and you can see that our commentary is successfully coming in so again we can try this with another month for example so if we went back into our assistant cleared our context and typed in load commentary again we didn't type that in it still detected that so even though we typed it in wrong it's gone and corrected us and again prompted us for our correct account so let's try and that oh try a different account cost center that's asked us for our version so we'll type in budget and again our commentaries been successfully loaded let's go and find that comment so we change our account this time and we also sent it to a different month oh let's check did we send it to that month yeah we did and you can see again we've loaded our commentary successfully and that about wraps up this video so we've now been able to load commentary into our planning analytics cube so we're able to go through this process capture all the entities and intents and push that data through so if we take a look at our to-do list we've set up our dialogue and we've also successfully tested our bot so we've done a bunch of stuff in this video so we've enabled our web hook we've set up our watson assistant created our skill intense entities and dialogues and we've also tested this out and successfully loaded our data into planning analytics now one last thing that i almost forgot to show so up until now we've been mainly working without bot using this sort of development interface but if you wanted to you can really quickly create a web chat component and embed it in your website so all you need to do to do that is select assistance up here select your budget bot that we created before and then hit add integration so from your integrations you've got a bunch of integrations into other systems but really we're just up to the web chat and we can name our chat so we can call it budget but and hit create and this will create a web ui component that you can see here and again we can use it through this so say for example wanted to load commentary again you can see that that's going to go down our flow so again we can type in our components [Music] again it's going to ask us what our comment is load running late and you can see we've successfully captured our comment through our chat bot and now if we go back to our dashboard you can see that our commentary has been updated so you can now take this component and you can embed it wherever you want so the script to do that is actually just on this embed bit here you can grab that script paste it into your website and you've got your very own budget bot up and running thanks so much for tuning in guys hopefully you found this video useful if you did be sure to give it a thumbs up hit subscribe and tick that bell so you get notified of when i release new videos and let me know in the comments below what you're building a budget plot for thanks again for tuning in [Music] peace [Music] you