One of the cool new features in Watson Conversation in IBM Bluemix is the ability to support a global audience by creating language specific versions of your bots. In this blog post I will give you some best-practices for creating bots in other languages.

To create a bot in a language other than English simply select the language from the pulldown for your workspace as shown below.

Now that you have your workspace configured for your desired language you can start creating the intents and entities.

When you create your intents you need to avoid using message fragments. You should create complete sentences. For example, in my Spanish insurance bot I use the complete sentence “Localizar mi póliza” rather than the message fragment “Localizar mi” as shown below.

It is important to use complete sentences for Watson Conversation’s training engine to work correctly. You may be asking yourself at this point if you need to create a separate sentence for every synonym of “póliza”. The good news is that this is unnecessary. You simply list all the possible synonyms associated with “póliza” on the entities screen. So in my case I defined a few synonyms for “póliza” as shown below.

When you define your conversation nodes you simply indicate the intent and entity to use in the dialog. In my case I set my node to use the #policy-information intent combined with the @policy entity as shown below.

I hope this post helps you quickly get going with creating multilingual conversational bots using Watson Conversation.