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.
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 contains all of your choices for colors and avatar images. Set this up with colors that match your theme — use one of the HTML color pickers that you might find online. You can also add an icon, but be aware of a few things. One — the icon needs to be at a web address where it can be found and read — so it probably should be a file on your website. It can’t be just a JPG that you have on your hard drive (or a picture of your dog — I was hoping for that….).
The other thing is that the image needs to be between 64 x 64 and 100 x 100 pixels in size. Try to keep it square (or it may get distorted).
The next tab is the Home Screen tab. This is new stuff. Turn it on and see how the home screen will pull your users in, and provide them with some common examples of some things that they might ask about. This is really useful for deployments where the users may not be sure of the types of things that they can ask your assistant. It might…
