Ask any office manager about ordering supplies and you're likely to get a few groans. Overseeing office procedures requires a level of complexity as customer expectations continue to grow. Shoppers today are looking to order exactly what they want, when they want it, no matter the time or place. Office products and services superstore and US e-commerce leader, Staples, has partnered with IBM Watson to not only alleviate the back-office headache, but meet the increasing needs of their customers. With more buying options than ever--and heightened customer expectations--Staples hopes to make it easier for businesses to order office supplies and services anytime, anywhere.

Before building the chatbot, let us first understand the technology that is powering this chatbot. IBM Bluemix is a Platform As A Service cloud offering from IBM. It enables developers to quickly create, deploy, and manage applications on the cloud by abstracting other layers. Watson is a cognitive system that can understand all forms of data, interact naturally with people, and learn and derive insights out of it, at scale. Watson is available as a set of open APIs and SaaS products.

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The Watson Conversation service is a critical component you can use to rapidly deploy a range of bots across a host of channels that will enable your software to build dialog with humans and stimulate conversation. You simply supply your expertise in the form of intents, entities, and well-crafted conversations and the end result is a trained, natural-conversation model that can be integrated into simple chatbots and sophisticated virtual agents designed for mobile devices, messaging platforms, and even robots. In this tour of a simulated, in-vehicle application, you can see how voice commands direct the automobile to perform certain functions such as turning on and off lights and screen wipers. "The application is configured to send signals to the Watson Conversation service. The service, in turn, has been trained to recognize intents and entities that may be uttered by a typical driver. The service is also trained in a dialog flow which allows the service to respond in a natural way to the user's input."