Some common services that can be used to build bots with Mirosoft Bot Framework
Building a bot from scratch is hard. All human has some common capbilities like see, hear, smell etc. A bot should have some fundamental functionalilies built in as well. In this repo, I hope we can build up a toolbox of individual modules. In the future, if you want to build a bot that can take some order from customers, but you want your bot to feel like human and chit chat a little, like check weather, or tell a joke, or understand the image the customer send you. You can plugin these modules and play.
I think we should build these common modules. The list is not based on priorities, some of them are implemented first because I've used them in my previous projects.
- Vision Service - Understand the image, detects objects/celebrities, read text from the image. I've build a service using microsofot vision API, you can help build more implemations by connecting to other APIs.
- QR Code - I've created two implementaitons of the QR decoders, it can decode a normal QR code or colored ones generated ColorZXing.Net RGB mode.
- Other commonly used services
These services should be defined as interfaces, and we can build multiple implementations of these interfaces. e.g. IVisionService
public Task<OcrResult> ReadTextFromImageAsyc(string imageUrl);
public Task<T> ReadTextFromImageAsyc<T>(string imageUrl, IConverter<OcrResult, T> beautifier);
For each feature, I think we should create two functions, one returns a objec which user can dig into the details implement their own logic. The second one takes in a Converter which returns a converted object. Some common scenrios could be you want to generate a Hero card directly, or you just want to get the text result. You can also implement your own converter to create your own objects based on the interface result.
Whenever applicable, a class should be able to be initialized using dependency injection or by passing in the parameters directly. e.g. The AzureVisionService
public AzureVisionService(IConfiguration configuration)
public AzureVisionService(string endpoint, string key)
This project is still at the early stage, but you can try it using the sample nuget package. https://www.nuget.org/packages/Bot.CommonServices/
Install-Package Bot.CommonServices
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Feel free to reach me through email (hainan.zhao@live.com), or we can arrange some calls to discusse more details. All advice/feedback/contributions are appreciated.