Challenge Overview
Welcome to IBM Cognitive ChatBot - “Connect” With Us Contest. As part of this contest, you will create a ChatBot for use in Topcoder Connect. This contest is part of the IBM Cognitive series where we are attempting to create a ChatBot application using IBM Bluemix.
Challenge Prizes
This challenge is part of the Topcoder Cognitive Community challenge series. Along with the cash prizes, you will win Cognitive points toward the leaderboard and the leader at the end of the challenge series wins an all expenses paid trip to TCO 17.
The placement you earn in these challenges (non-F2F) will determine how many Cognitive points will be added to your total on the leaderboard:
1st place: 500pts
2nd place: 350pts
3rd place+: 100pts
Setup
If you have not already, go to http://cognitive.topcoder.com/ and click the Join the Topcoder Cognitive Community Button. Fill out the registration form and confirm your email address.
Go to the challenge forum and follow the thread on how to setup or extend your Bluemix trial account. Doing so will give you a Bluemix account without requiring you to enter your credit card information. Even if you did this on the last challenge, do it again to extend your free trial further for this challenge.
Contest Details
Topcoder Connect is our customer-facing platform that enables business users, of all skill levels, to interact with our member community to drive quality results. It is where our customers input their business needs and technical requirements. Imagine yourself to be a client of Topcoder and you have requirements for a typical chatbot application. You know what Topcoder is and the value that crowdsourcing has to offer. You wish Topcoder to take up your requirements and provide you with a functioning ChatBot application.
With this imagination, how should Topcoder approach you to gather all requirements needed to build the application? What questions should Topcoder ask you to be able to understand your ChatBot better? Should you be sharing any materials with Topcoder to help with the understanding? Should these be of a specific format or structure? How can you, the client, convey to Topcoder and the community what features your ChatBot application provides, who the ChatBot acts as (customer service? Sales? support?) and how it converses with the end user?
You need to create a ChatBot application using IBM Watson’s Conversation Service that asks the above questions to Topcoder’s clients. In other words, create a ChatBot application that asks the user to enter specific input to be able to create another ChatBot application. Provide a guide (similar to the Getting Started Guides that any new tech comes along with) that is easy to follow.
Make sure your ChatBot asks for all relevant pieces of a Watson Conversation, such as intents, entities, and example dialog. Also it should gather how the user wants to use the chatbot (from a website, slack/facebook chat, etc) and what integrations will be used. It should be good enough to give Topcoder an idea of the scope of the project, but friendly and helpful enough that it doesn’t feel like the user is filling out a form.
Participants are requested to note that we are using the Data Science Subjective Scorecard for this contest. You will be judged based on the following criteria:
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If your guide has requested all the information that is necessary to take the ChatBot application from Concept to Creation.
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Your application is able to handle exceptions or invalid inputs
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If your application is able to return the correct actions based on user input.
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How convenient it is for Topcoder to provide an estimate to the client on the effort involved to realize the requirements and kick off contests purely based on the interaction the client has had with the ChatBot. In other words, Topcoder would not require any further communication or clarifications with the client and that Topcoder has all the information it needs (besides the budget) to launch contests around it.