After setting up the IBM Watson Conversation service on my Raspberry Pi today I was disappointed to see that I'd have to write out every possible input (intent) and output (entity). Chalk this up to my extreme naivety around machine learning, But isn't there a way to tie into an existing set of conversation capabilities?
For example, I'm sure Watson already knows all the words for Hello and their proper responses. Or how to answer a variety of silly questions. Is there any way to tap into the Watson we all saw on Jeopardy?
Thanks for your help!
There are a number of options here.
System Entities
These are pre-defined to allow you to understand certain common concepts. Numbers, Currency and Dates are the available ones at the moment, but there are more coming.
Entites
You can also pull public lists and import as CSV. For example: http://data.okfn.org/data/core/country-list . You may need to check the licensing before using though.
Intents
As you mentioned there is no pre-defined intents. But there are two solutions available that augment conversation.
First is "Watson Virtual Agent". This is a SaaS that contains pre-defined training sets for certain industries, as well as custom UI you can slot into your application. It's not cheap, but you can get a trial to play with it.
The other option is "Project Intu". It's still experimental, but it's purpose is to help in building robots/IOT devices. It contains pre-defined chit chat and some off topic stuff.
They have a "TJ Bot" project which can be used with a raspberry pi.