Bot Framework and Cognitive Services

Before I forget, a bunch of useful links:

1. Presenter Bot Video (5min)
2. Bot Framework Homepage
3. Bot Framework Documentation
4. Getting Started - How It Works
5. AzureLens Architecture
6. Bot Framework Emulator

Now let's code.

Design of an empty Bot Framework App

• See initial checkin #488bfe6 on master.
• Run it
  • Connect the Emulator
  • Show Log and Details

There's a lot you can do here without any additional help. And since our introducer mentioned rich interfaces, let's look at Adaptive Cards. They support images, speech, containers, columns, actions and more. They don't work perfectly everywhere, but they work in many places

• Discuss Channels
• Discuss Dialogs

LUIS (Luis.ai)

• Free up to 10,000 transactions per month, then $0.75 per 1,000 transactions
• LUIS Apps
• Intents and Entities

There are a lot of other lower-level services from Cognitive Services:

• The Text Analytics API detects sentiment, key phrases, topics, and language from text.
• The Bing Spell Check API provides not just spell check capabilities, but recognition of names, brand names, and slang.
• The Linguistic Analysis API can break down sentence structure, performing part-of-speech tagging, etc.
• The Entity Linking Intelligence Service annotates unstructured text with the relevant entities mentioned in the text (note this uses the Microsoft Graph, and can plug into your work knowledgebase, etc).
• The Bing Speech API provides speech-to-text and text-to-speech conversion capabilities, and the Speaker Recognition API even enables speaker identification and verification through voice.
• So many more: computer vision, face recognition, emotion detection, web search, image and video search, news search, etc.

Q&A ((QnAmaker.ai)[https://qnamaker.ai/])

• The easiest Question and Answer bot
• QnA Apps
• So easy to import a FAQ. Let's use one I started for PowerShell

Other resources

• VSTS Bot
• Github Samples