What is the benefit of the new webhooks feature in Watson Assistant

When building an AI chatbot it is impossible to incorporate all knowledge directly in your skill. As a result developers often find themselves wanting to call external functions to answer certain queries. IBM has responded to this requirement by supporting the calling of cloud functions from within a Dialog node in Watson Assistant.

While developers have found this useful, they have also complained that it is inflexible and not so easy to use. To answer these complaints,  IBM has recently released a new feature called webhooks. This feature was available in limited Beta for several months, but has just been released generally so now is a good time to look at it.

This table summarises the differences between the two mechanisms:

Aspect	webhooks	old way
URL Flexibility	With webhooks you can call any arbitrary URL. This means that you are not tied to using IBM Cloud Functions as an intermediate layer, Of course Watson Assistant will always make a POST call to your URL and supply the parameters in JSON. If the REST API you want to call does not accept this, you will need some mechanism to transform the call. However, you are free to choose any transformation tool that you want.	With the old mechanism, you could only call a Cloud Function which is defined in the same environment as the Watson Assistant instance which is doing the calling. This was quite restrictive and although it worked OK with Cloud Foundry based authentication, it was not really compatible with the new IAM style resource group authentication currently used in the IBM cloud.
UI Assistance	There is a UI to guide you in defining the authorisation and other parameters for your call to a webhook. This makes it quite user friendly.	The way that you specified that a REST call should be made is by editing the JSON response from a node to include an action parameter. Apart from the documentation there was no assistance to developer to define this correctly.

Now that we have compared the two mechanisms, our next blog post will look at a simple example of migrating from one to the other.