Build Alexa Voice Bot with Node.js for Restaurant Reservation Use Case

"Alexa, I want to make a reservation!"

How many of you are planning to make your hands dirty on the Alexa world? Curious to know how a voice bot can be build using Amazon Alexa and Node.js application? This blog is the right place for you. Let's start.

Part 1:

First you need to identify the use case. Here we are dealing with a voice based restaurant reservation system. When a person says to Alexa that he wants to make a restaurant reservation, basically he is showing the intent to make a reservation. Also the reservation will have few slots like date of reservation, time, city etc. These are called slots. Once you identify the intents and slots for your use case, design the voice bot in Amazon Alexa Skill Kit (ASK) first. In ASK you need to define the intents, utterances, slots.

Create a chatbot using IBM Watson Assistant and PHP

Chat bot has recently created havoc among consumer business. Many people are saying chat bot's usability is going to increase in coming years and you must be wondering how to create a chat bot? This blog will help a beginner to build a chat bot using IBM Watson Assistant (formerly known as Watson Conversation) service which has free subscription option useful for learning purpose. Also we will use PHP as server side language as a controller which will interact with the Assistant tool to continue the dialog flow of the conversation.

We have selected restaurant reservation as a use case for the bot. This bot will have give the user 3 options like Make or Cancel or Reschedule reservation in a particular restaurant. In this tutorial we will use the usage of Slot features in Watson Assistant tool and also will use handlers. We will see how we can integrate with Facebook Messenger to access the chat bot using the PHP controller and finally integrating with Microsoft Teams.