In this training session, we’re going to learn how to create a virtual rapporteur. A digital assistant who can join any conference call; record it and provide participants with real-time insights into the overall tone of the call. Once the call is complete, we’ll look at how we can use the call recording to provide participants with a text transcript as well as meta information about the call such as the most talked about concepts, keywords and entities.

Outline

Creating our conference

• What is Hug
• Creating a conference line with Hug & Nexmo
• Running our Hug server

Adding our bot and recording the call

• Creating our bot API endpoint

Sending our audio to IBM Watson

• Introducing Tornado
• Handling a WebSocket Connection
• Using on_message to proxy data to IBM Watson

Performing our sentiment analysis

• Sending our transcription to the tone analyser service

Displaying in the browser

• Demo

Fetching our recording

• Downloading the mp3 with requests
• Sending the mp3 to be transcribed

Using the Natural Language Understanding API

• Sending our transcription to the NLU API
• Saving the response

Pulling it all together

• Final Demo

Attendees: you should be familiar with Python and the command line. You will also need to sign-up for a free Nexmo and IBM Watson account to access their APIs.

We’ll be coding the application in Python and JavaScript, with the Hug, Tornado frameworks; so a knowledge of both languages would be beneficial but is not required. We will be making heavy use of several APIs, so experience with REST and WebSockets will help.