What is the difference between Watson Assistant (formerly Watson Conversation) and Watson Assistant Solutions

Question

I'm only familiar with Watson Assistant because I've done some work with it but I've never used Watson Assistant Solutions.

Is it a new API or an app on top of Watson Assistant? When should I use one or the other?

Answer 1

They are both IBM Cloud/SaaS services. You can learn more about them here:

Watson Assistant (formerly Conversation Service)

• Build multi-turn natural language dialog.
• Catalog of already configured customer service and skill workspaces.
• Insights into conversations and improve your training
• Built-in system entities to ease conversation design
• Doc, Boilerplate apps, REST API, SDK and skill Workspaces
• Publish AI bot channels for Watson Assistant AI bot to Slack, Facebook, Messenger, or Twilio.

Watson Assistant Solutions An AI assistant framework, services and starters that you use to build your own branded, personal and proactive multi modal personal assistant. Optimized for use with any IOT device.

Watson Assistant for Industry

• Out of the box skills: Weather, Greeting, Conversational Essentials, General Knowledge and IFTTT. Includes Watson Assistant (Formerly Watson Conversation Service) workspaces.
• Device enabled for allowing users to communicate via Audio Gateway for Voice
• Contextual skill routing service using via intent, location, language and previous skill context
• Doc, SDK and Skill Boilerplate to build new custom skills

Watson Assistant for Hospitality

• Includes Watson Assistant for Industry
• Out of the box hospitality skills for Service Requests, Venue Information, Reservations, Command and control of devices & more

Watson Assistant for Automotive

• Includes Watson Assistant for Industry
• Out of the box automotive skills: IOT for Automotive to understand car data, Points of Interest, Navigation and Car Manual
• Business Console for administrating skills

Answer 2

Well, IBM has its IBM Cloud offering that delivers infrastructure, platform, functions and more as a service (IaaS, PaaS, FaaS). Let's take a look at both of the Watson Assistant offerings:

1. Watson Assistant (formerly Conversation) is one of the platform services and features cognitive chatbot capabilities.
2. IBM also has a new product in its overall portfolio which is named Watson Assistant, the AI assistant for business. It is a software as a service (SaaS). There are industry-specific solutions (health, automotive, hospitality, ...) that are based on the capabilities of Watson Assistant (see 1), but feature industry insights, branding and integration with customer environments.

To make it programming-related: If you want to develop your own chatbot or chatbot-based solution from scratch, go with 1) and its API and SDKs (Nodejs, Python, ...). If you want to start on a higher level with pre-built assets, investigate 2).