via Paul Stubbs on Linkedin

Getting Starting Building Bots

The Azure Bot Service is how you build conversational apps also referred to as bots, chatbots, digital agents. The Azure Bot Service is an evolution of the Bot Framework that provides a scalable, integrated bot development and hosting environment for conversational bots that can reach customers across multiple channels on any device. It is easy to get started using one of the five built-in bot templates for scenarios including basic, form, language understanding, question and answer, and proactive bots.

 Announcing General Availability of the Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding service

The Microsoft Cognitive Services are a set of REST APIs that give your bots the ability to see, hear, speak, understand, and interpret needs using natural methods of communication. Cognitive Services becomes the brains of the bot. One of the most important Cognitive Services for bots is the Language Understanding service (LUIS). LUIS maps what the user says to what they want to do. For example, if I say, “What’s the weather”, my intent is for the bot to return the weather. In order for the bot to fulfill my intent of getting the weather, the bot will need to call a weather service. Your bot is a web service that can handle messages sent from communication apps like Facebook Messenger, Skype, Cortana, Slack, and many more including your own custom apps. One of the most frequent questions I get is “Can a bot do X” where X is any number of things. Your bot can do anything that has a public callable API. In fact, we have also released a number of scenarios to help you think of how bots fit into the way the you interact with your users. You can see these scenarios by visiting the Azure Bot Service home page.

The future of computing is natural conversational interactions. Get started for free today building your own conversational apps with the Azure Bot Service. Start with the technical blog to walkthrough building your first bot. Once you build your first bot start reading some of the other links to create more advanced bots.

Microsoft AI and Bot resources: