Top Secret Virtual Assistant Launcher Hacks

This post originally posted on the IBM Watson Apps Community, under the title Top Secret Virtual Assistant Hacks on September 24, 2020.

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

I usually start these blog posts talking about the smart people that I work with. Today I learned something new, with some guidance from our IBM Watson development team. It has to do with some top-secret, virtual assistant launcher hacks. OK — none of this is really top secret stuff, but it is the kind of thing that is good to know — and the type of thing that can make your virtual assistant look so much more professional and useful. I got into this because one of my current customers had a COVID-19 chatbot, which has its own launcher, with a disclaimer page. What it didn’t have, was the ability to change the color scheme of the launcher button. So we wanted to do a more standard launcher.

Step 1 — Set up the Color Scheme

Go into your Watson Assistant instance, and look at your Assistants. Now go into one of your Assistants, and look at what is set up. You probably see a dialog skill, and maybe even a search skill. You should also see some integrations. If your assistant is deployed on a web page, you will see the Web Chat integration listed here. Click on it and you will see some particulars about your Assistant.
The first tab that you see is the Style tab. This…