vania-janet/multiturn-rag-retrieval-data huggingface dataset:
This documentation is for the classic Watson Assistant experience. To see the documentation for the new Watson Assistant, please go [here](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-assistant).



 Failover options 

This document explains some actions you can take to increase the availability of Watson Assistant for your organization.



 Introduction 

IBM Watson Assistant instances are deployed across multizone regions (MZRs) in all data centers (except Seoul, Korea) and can withstand the loss of any individual zone within an MZR. However, regional outages can occur and while IBM strives to keep these to a minimum, you may want to consider moving traffic to a different region for your business-critical applications.

To achieve this, you should have a copy of your Watson Assistant instance in a different MZR (for example, have your assistant deployed in US East and US South). To do this, you must purchase a second service instance of Watson Assistant, and second instances of the necessary assistants and skills need to be instantiated. You must implement change management controls to synchronize the changes between the two regions. Watson Assistant and Speech services have APIs available to export and import the definitions.

With two instances, there are two topologies to consider:



* Active/active: Both instances always serving traffic with the load sprayed between the two.
* Active/passive: One instance is active and the passive site only receives traffic in the event of a failover.



There are pros and cons to both approaches, and considerations specific to Watson Assistant are detailed in the sections that follow.





 Considerations 

Watson Assistant instances in one region are unaware of instances in a second region, which can affect some features and capabilities in Watson Assistant.



 Analytics 

Watson Assistant analytics provide overview statistics on the number of interactions with users and containment rates. Analytics doesn't cumulate statistics across regions. With an active/passive topology, this approach to analytics should be sufficient. However, using an active/active topology likely requires using [webhooks](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-webhook-log) to gather interaction data, and build custom data warehouses and reports to understand total usage.





 Recommendations
: Watson Assistant for IBM Cloud Pak® for Data 4.6.0 is compatible with IBM Cloud Pak® for Data Version 4.6. See the [support matrix](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant-data?topic=assistant-data-installinstall-support-matrix) for more details. This release of Watson Assistant for IBM Cloud Pak® for Data includes various fixes and features.

New Watson Assistant experience
: With the new experience in Watson Assistant, you can build, test, publish, and analyze your assistant from one simple and intuitive interface that focuses on using actions to build customer conversations. To learn more about building your assistant with actions, see [Welcome to the new Watson Assistant](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-assistant).

New algorithm version setting
: You can now choose one of three Watson Assistant algorithm version settings to apply to your future trainings: Beta, Latest, or Previous. This new Algorithm Version setting replaced Intent Detection in the Options section of a dialog skill. Beta and Latest use more enhanced intent detection that is available in more languages: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional) Czech, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. See [Algorithm version](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-assistant?topic=watson-assistant-algorithm-version).

Credential rotation
: You can now rotate your credentials for added data store security. See [Managing security for your Watson Assistant datastores](https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cloud-paks/cp-data/4.6.x?topic=administering-managing-security-your-datastores).

Autoscaling
: Using Red Hat® OpenShift® Horizontal Pod Autoscaler, you can optionally enable autoscaling for Watson Assistant so that the service dynamically scales up and down to make efficient use of cluster resources. For details, see [Automatically scaling resources for services](https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/cloud-paks/cp-data/4.6.x?topic=services-automatically-scaling).
[Build a database-driven Slackbot](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/solution-tutorials?topic=solution-tutorials-slack-chatbot-database-watson)Build a database-driven Slackbot

In this tutorial, you are going to build a Slackbot which allows to search and create entries in a backend Db2 on Cloud database. The Slackbot is backed by the IBM Watson® Assistant service. You will integrate Slack and IBM Watson® Assistant using an Assistant integration. Db2 on Cloud is made available to Watson Assistant as custom extension.

Code Engine Watson Assistant

+1

Db2 on Cloud



* 2 hours
* 2023-05-05



[Use NeuralSeek to return polished answers from existing help content](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-assistant?topic=watson-assistant-tutorial-neuralseek)Use NeuralSeek to return polished answers from existing help content

In this tutorial, you will use the Watson Discovery, Watson Assistant, and NeuralSeek services that are available from the IBM Cloud catalog to create a virtual assistant that can answer questions about Watson Discovery. The assistant will generate answers by using the existing Watson Discovery product documentation as its knowledge base.

Watson Assistant



* 4 hours
* 2023-05-05



Analytics[Explore creating serverless instances and submitting applications using the CLI](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/AnalyticsEngine?topic=AnalyticsEngine-using-cli)Explore creating serverless instances and submitting applications using the CLI

Learn how to use the IBM Analytics Engine CLI to create the services that you need to create and manage a serverless instance, and submit and monitor your Spark applications.

Analytics Engine



* 15 minutes
* 2022-08-26



[Process big data logs with SQL](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/solution-tutorials?topic=solution-tutorials-big-data-log-analytics)Process big data logs with SQL

In this tutorial, you will build a log analysis pipeline designed to collect, store and analyze log records to support regulatory requirements or aid information discovery.
The release notes for the classic Watson Assistant experience has moved. For the most up-to-date version, see [Release notes for Watson Assistant](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-assistant?topic=watson-assistant-watson-assistant-release-notes). To see all documentation for the new Watson Assistant, please go [here](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-assistant).



 Release notes for Watson Assistant 

Use these release notes to learn about the latest updates to IBM Watson® Assistant.

For information about changes to the web chat integration, see the [Web Chat release notes](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-assistant?topic=watson-assistant-release-notes-chat).

On [7 October 2021](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant?topic=assistant-release-notesassistant-oct072021), the new Watson Assistant experience became available. This documentation applies to the classic Watson Assistant.



 22 May 2023 

Changes to the date and number formats in assistant responses
: Beginning 22 May 2023, customers might see changes to the date and number formats in assistant responses.

Examples of date changes include removed or added periods, such as:



* In Spanish, 18 abr. 2021 changes to 18 abr 2021
* In Portuguese, 18 de abr changes to 18 de abr.



The delimiter character changes for numbers in some languages. For example, in French, nonbreaking space (NBSP) changes to narrow no-break space (NNBSP).

These changes are the result of migrating the Watson Assistant platform to Java 17, where locale values are updated by using specifications in [CLDR 39](https://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-39).

To avoid or minimize the impact of similar changes in the future, you can use [Actions display formats](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-assistant?topic=watson-assistant-actions-global-settingsactions-global-settings-display-formats).





 18 May 2023
For more information, see [Switching the experience](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-assistant?topic=watson-assistant-welcome-new-assistantwelcome-new-assistant-switch-experience).





 Is the classic Watson Assistant experience going away? 

IBM has no plans to discontinue the classic Watson Assistant experience. However, we encourage you to explore the benefits and capabilities in the new Watson Assistant. For more information, see the [Getting Started guide](https://www.ibm.com/blogs/watson/2021/12/getting-started-with-the-new-watson-assistant-part-i-the-build-guide/) or the [documentation](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-assistant) for the new experience.





 Where are the search skill and channel integrations in the new Watson Assistant experience? 

In the left navigation, click Integrations![Integrations](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs-content/v1/content/ca9232b3702768f24bb897f48f10778fcda28718/watson-assistant/images/integrations-icon.png). On the Integrations page, you can add search, channel, and extension integrations to your assistant. For more information, see [Adding integrations](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-assistant?topic=watson-assistant-deploy-integration-add).





 Where is the Assistant ID found in the new product experience? 

The assistant ID can be found in Assistant settings.

In Assistant settings, the assistant ID is in the Assistant IDs and API details section.







 What do the draft and live tags mean? 

A Draft tag indicates that the information is linked to your draft environment, which means that you can preview these updates but they are not visible to your users. A Live tag indicates that the information is linked to your live environment, which means that the content is available to your users to interact with.
Power your assistant with answers from web resources 

In this tutorial, you will use the Watson Discovery and Watson Assistant services to create a virtual assistant that can answer questions about the latest research from the US Federal Reserve. The assistant will answer questions by using up-to-date, existing research publications from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) website.

IBM Cloud

Follow this tutorial only if you are using a managed deployment.



 Learning objectives 

By the time you finish the tutorial, you will understand how to:



* Create an action in Watson Assistant that can recognize questions about a particular subject.
* Create a Conversational Search project in Discovery.
* Add a web crawl data source to your project.
* Connect your Watson Assistant action to a search extension that gets answers from your Discovery project.
* Use your assistant to return answers that it retrieves from the website.





 Duration 

This tutorial will take approximately 2 to 3 hours to complete.





 Prerequisite 



1. Before you begin, you must set up a paid account with IBM Cloud.

You can complete this tutorial at no cost by using a Plus plan, which offers a 30-day trial at no cost. However, to create a Plus plan instance of the service, you must have a paid account (where you provide credit card details). For more information about creating a paid account, see [Upgrading your account](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/account?topic=account-upgrading-account).
2. Create a Plus plan Discovery service instance.

Go to the [Discovery resource](https://cloud.ibm.com/catalog/services/watson-discovery) page in the IBM Cloud catalog and create a Plus plan service instance.



If you decide to stop using the Plus plan and don't want to pay for it, delete the Plus plan service instance before the 30-day trial period ends.







 Step 1: Create an assistant 

For this tutorial, you will create an assistant with a single action. First, you must create a Watson Assistant service instance.

Both Lite and Trial plan Watson Assistant service instances are available at no cost.
For more details, see [Testing your dialog](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant-data?topic=assistant-data-dialog-tasksdialog-tasks-test).





 3 September 2019 

IBM Watson® Assistant for IBM Cloud Pak® for Data version 1.3 is available
: Watson Assistant for IBM Cloud Pak® for Data version 1.3 is compatible with IBM Cloud Pak® for Data versions 2.1.0.1 and 2.1.0.2. There is now added support for installing IBM Cloud Pak for Data with Red Hat OpenShift.

Federal Information Security Management Act support
: Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) support is available for Watson Assistant for IBM Cloud Pak for Data for this version (V1.3). FISMA support is also available to those who purchased V1.2 (28 June 2019) and upgraded to V1.3. Watson Assistant for IBM Cloud Pak for Data is FISMA High Ready.

Provision more instances in a single deployment
: You can now provision up to 30 instances of Watson Assistant in a single deployment.

Search skill now generally available
: The search skill is now generally available.

Features not included
: This release does not include the following features, which are currently available for cloud instances:



* Autocorrection, intent recommendations, and webhooks are not supported.
* The product tour that is available to some first time users of the cloud-based product is not available.
* The new JavaScript library that is being used in cloud instances to increase the page responsiveness is not in use.







 28 June 2019 

IBM Watson® Assistant for IBM Cloud Pak® for Data version 1.2 is available
: The Watson Assistant tool now works with IBM Cloud Pak for Data 2.1. It does not work with stand-alone IBM Cloud Private. The following changes were made in this release:

Assistants are now available
: An assistant can manage user sessions on your behalf. See [Assistants](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/assistant-data?topic=assistant-data-assistants).

Search skill is a new beta feature
13 January 2022 

New setting for options customer response type
: In actions, a new List options setting allows you to enable or disable the options customer response from appearing in a list. This can be useful to prevent a phone integration from reading a long list of options to the customer. As part of this change, all customer response types now have a Settings icon. Allow skipping has moved from Edit Response and is now found in the new settings. For more information, see [Collecting information from your customers](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-assistant?topic=watson-assistant-collect-info).





 24 December 2021 

Apache Log4j security vulnerability updates
: Watson Assistant upgraded to using Log4j version 2.17.0, which addresses all of the Critical severity and High severity Log4j CVEs, specifically CVE-2021-45105, CVE-2021-45046, and CVE-2021-44228.





 3 December 2021 

Configure webhook timeout
: From the Pre-message webhook and Post-message webhook configuration pages, you can configure the webhook timeout length from a minimum of 1 second to a maximum of 30 seconds. For more information, see [Extending your assistant with webhooks](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-assistant?topic=watson-assistant-webhook-overview).

User-based switching between Watson Assistant experiences
: Previously, switching between the new Watson Assistant experience and the classic Watson Assistant experience was instance-based. For example, if a user switched from the classic experience to the new experience, all users of that Watson Assistant instance were switched to the new experience. Now, switching between the experiences is user-based. So, any user of a Watson Assistant instance can switch between the new and classic experiences, and other users of that Watson Assistant instance are not affected.





 27 November 2021 

New API version
: The current API version is now 2021-11-27. This version introduces the following changes:



* The output.text object is no longer returned in message responses. All responses, including text responses, are returned only in the output.generic array.
oc apply -f - ${DRY_RUN}
done
Show more





 Fixing a size large Watson Assistant installation 

Apply this fix if you installed a size large Watson Assistant deployment, and your installation fails to complete successfully. In some cases, Watson Assistant pods aren't able to communicate with other pods, and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections can't be established.

To confirm whether you are affected by this issue, run the following command:

oc logs --selector app=sdn --namespace openshift-sdn --container sdn | grep "Ignoring NetworkPolicy"

If you are affected, you see output similar to the following example:

W0624 12:58:21.407901 2480 networkpolicy.go:484] Ignoring NetworkPolicy cpd/wa-network-policy because it generates

If you encounter this error, apply the following fix to resolve the issue. The following fix uses wa as the name of the Watson Assistant instance. This value is set in an environment variable. Before you run the command, update the INSTANCE variable with the name of your instance:

INSTANCE=wa ; DRY_RUN="--dry-run=client --output=yaml" To apply the changes, change to an empty string
DRY_RUN=""
for MICROSERVICE in analytics clu-embedding clu-serving clu-training create-slot-job data-governor dialog dragonfly-clu-mm ed es-store etcd integrations master nlu recommends sireg-ubi-ja-tok-20160902 sireg-ubi-ko-tok-20181109 spellchecker-mm store store-admin store-cronjob store-sync store_db_creator store_db_schema_updater system-entities tfmm ui ${INSTANCE}-redis webhooks-connector
do
 Get original networking policy
 Clean up metadata fields to get the resource applied by Watson Assistant
 Change name and add component to selector
 Apply to the cluster
Build a database-driven Slackbot 

This tutorial may incur costs. Use the [Cost Estimator](https://cloud.ibm.com/estimator/review) to generate a cost estimate based on your projected usage.

In this tutorial, you are going to build a Slackbot which allows to search and create entries in a backend Db2 on Cloud database. The Slackbot is backed by the IBM Watson® Assistant service. You will integrate Slack and IBM Watson® Assistant using an Assistant integration. Db2 on Cloud is made available to Watson Assistant as custom extension.

The Slack integration sends messages between Slack and Watson Assistant. A custom extension, written in Python and deployed as serverless Code Engine app, exposes a REST API against the database backend.

This tutorial uses the new experience of Watson Assistant and an action skill. A former version was based on the dialog skill and the database was integrated using IBM Cloud® Functions with code written in Node.js. You can find that version of the tutorial in the [cloud-functions branch of the related code repository](https://github.com/IBM-Cloud/slack-chatbot-database-watson/tree/cloud-functions).



 Objectives 



* Build a chatbot using Watson Assistant which interacts with a database backend
* Connect Watson Assistant to Slack using an integration
* Create and deploy a Python database app to Code Engine
* Access a Db2 on Cloud database via a Watson Assistant custom extension



Zoom

![Architecture](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs-content/v1/content/f84e2238288b7f0355715a4c355609ce7ac48fb0/solution-tutorials/images/solution19/SlackbotArchitecture.svg)

Figure 1. Architecture diagram of the tutorial



1. The user interacts with [IBM Watson® Assistant](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/watson-assistant), either through Slack or using a web chat client
2.
Integrating with Slack 

IBM Cloud

Slack is a cloud-based messaging application that helps people collaborate with one another.

After you create an action, you can integrate your assistant with Slack.

When integrated, depending on the events that you configure the assistant to support, your assistant can respond to questions that are asked in direct messages or in channels where the assistant is directly mentioned.

An example and instructions on how to create a Slackbot using Watson Assistant, Slack, and Db2 are given in the solution tutorial, [Build a database-driven Slackbot](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/solution-tutorials?topic=solution-tutorials-slack-chatbot-database-watson).



 Adding the Slack integration 



1. Go to the Integrations page by clicking the integrations icon (![Integrations icon](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs-content/v1/content/ca9232b3702768f24bb897f48f10778fcda28718/watson-assistant/images/integrations-icon.png)) in the left menu.
2. Click Add on the Slack tile.
3. Click Confirm.
4. You need to have a Slack app to connect to.

If you don’t have a Slack app, create one now. See [Starting with Slack apps](https://api.slack.com/start).
5. Go to the [Your Apps](https://api.slack.com/apps) page on the Slack website, and then click the app you want to use.

Open the Slack app in a new browser tab, so you can easily switch back and forth between the Slack app settings page and Watson Assistant Slack integration configuration page.
6. From the settings page for your Slack app, open the App Home page.
7. Add access scopes for your Slack app.

The button label might be Review Scopes to Add or Update scopes depending on whether you are creating a new app or editing an app that you created before February 2020.

The method for Slack access changed.
Using IBM Cloud Activity Tracker to audit user activity ![Enterprise plan only](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs-content/v1/content/ca9232b3702768f24bb897f48f10778fcda28718/watson-assistant/images/enterprise.png) 

![IBM Cloud only](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs-content/v1/content/ca9232b3702768f24bb897f48f10778fcda28718/watson-assistant/images/ibm-cloud.png)IBM Cloud only

You can use the IBM Cloud Activity Tracker service to track how users and applications interact with IBM Watson® Assistant in IBM Cloud®. This applies to both the classic and new experiences of Watson Assistant.

IBM Cloud Activity Tracker records user-initiated activities that change the state of a service in IBM Cloud. You can use this service to investigate abnormal activity and critical actions and to comply with regulatory audit requirements. In addition, you can be alerted about actions as they happen. The events that are collected comply with the Cloud Auditing Data Federation (CADF) standard. For more information, see [Getting started with IBM Cloud Activity Tracker](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/activity-tracker?topic=activity-tracker-getting-started).



 Viewing events 

Events that are generated by an instance of the Watson Assistant service are automatically forwarded to the IBM Cloud Activity Tracker service instance that is available in the same location. However, if your service instance is hosted in the Washington DC location, create the IBM Cloud Activity Tracker service instance in the Dallas region.

IBM Cloud Activity Tracker can have only one instance per location. To view events, you must access the web UI of the IBM Cloud Activity Tracker service in the same location where your service instance is available. For more information, see [Navigating to the UI](https://cloud.ibm.com/docs/activity-tracker?topic=activity-tracker-launch).

!