The sample application

We will build an application to handle a set of banking activities, such as checking your account balances, transferring funds, paying a credit card bill, and so forth. We'll keep this fairly simple to begin with, and then expand on this use case as we get deeper into other topics.

The application will begin with a text interface that we can run on a web page. We will expand that further, to run as an App on your mobile phone with a voice-activated interface. The thing to realize is that, since the Watson Assistant service is a callable API, the same conversational capabilities can be included into any number of application frontends—web applications, mobile phones, text messaging, other messaging platforms, such as Twitter, WhatsApp, or WeChat, as well as embedded system devices.