This presentation was carried out at the Adelaide Dot Net User Group in October 2017 about the Bot Framework. The presentation covered all aspects of the bot framework including demos and capabilities while touching up the advanced capabilities like LUIS, Cortana and Azure Bot Service.
2. Agenda
What’s a bot?
The “bot framework”
Capabilities of the framework
Channels
Deploying & Debugging techniques
Design considerations
Submitting to the marketplace
Tools of the trade
3. What is a Bot?
“a device or piece of software that can execute commands,
reply to messages, or perform routine tasks, as online
searches, either automatically or with minimal human
intervention (often used in combination)”
Dictionary.com
4. The Bot Framework
Release in 2016
New canvas for developers
New opportunities for businesses
Personal way to access, discover & interact
Microsoft actively investing and working with
channel providers
5. Business impact
Enhance productivity
Reach customers – multi platform & multi channels
Engage in a natural way
Expose products & services in high engaged platforms
Reduce human assistance
Improve customer experience
6. Bot Builder
• A framework
to develop
bots
• SDKs
• .Net, NodeJs
• Large set of
samples
Bot Framework
Portal
• Register
• Manage
• Central portal
Channels
• Ways of
exposing the
bots
• Skype
• Facebook
• Web Chat
• etc
Cognitive
• Make bots
smarter
• Self learn
• Natural
interaction
• LUIS
7.
8. Some use cases
Customer self service
Discover products & services
Connect with field staff integration
Lookup knowledge base
Proactively engage with customers
Assist with team collaboration
Personal digital assistant
A shortcut to get data from enterprise apps
13. Framework Capabilities
Connect line of business system
Dialogs
Form flow
Proactive messaging
Rich messaging
Hand off to human
IVR & Calling
Intelligence
and many more…
14. Dialogs
Control the bot’s conversation
Screen or dialog based navigation
Dialog lifecycle
15. Form Flow
Structured conversation
Bind a model to a conversation
Structured data capture
Automatically generate dialogs
Reduce time taken to create a bot
Less flexible compared to creating a custom dialog
Data validations
Navigation (go back, help & etc)
Different field types
16. Proactive Bots
Store subscriber/conversation information
Connect with subscribers on demand
React to server side events or triggers
19. Adaptive Cards
Microsoft is actively investing in the bot framework
Adding more intuitive ways to present and capture data
Declarative/Generic card definitions
Automatic styling
Increasing channel adoption
Render to image
Render to text
Render to image + text
20.
21. Hand-off to a human
Assist complex queries
Bot middleware
Routing
Agent recognition
Supervisor intervention
Agent only commands
23. LUIS
Language Understanding Intelligent Service
Add conversational intelligence
Learn and adapt
Pre built domains
Multilingual
24. FAQ to Bot in
minutes…
Convert Structured, Editorial content (FAQ Documents, FAQ
URL) into Bot readable knowledgebase
25. Bot design considerations
Does the bot easily solve the customer’s query in a
minimum number of steps?
Does the bot solve the query faster or better than
alternatives?
Does the bot run on platforms users care about?
26. First interaction
Hi, how can we help you?
Hi, how can we help you?
Check status
Get help
What’s new
27. Plan for unexpected questions
User : Make a reservation for Friday dinner
Bot : Sure, table reserved for Friday dinner, Is this
confirmed?
Yes
No
User : actually let’s change to Saturday dinner
28. Don’t expect users to follow the
structure
Bot : What city are you travelling to?
User : “CANCEL”
Bot : What city are you travelling to?
User : “HELP”
Bot : What city are you travelling to?
29. Validate input
Bot : Please enter phone number
User : “CANCEL”
Bot : Thanks, “CANCEL” has been recorded as your
phone number
30. Be transparent
Bot : How can I help you?
User : I want to know about the new products
User : Hello
User : Are you there?
User : ……
31. Submitting a Bot to Marketplace
Must do something meaningful
Appropriate bot profile
Instructions for taking payments
Privacy Policy & Terms and conditions
Code of conduct
More info : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bot-
framework/portal-bot-review-guidelines
32. Tools of the trade
Bot Builder Framework (github)
Bot Framework Portal
Bot Framework Simulator
Azure Cognitive Services
LUIS Portal
Cortana Portal
33. Recap
What’s a bot?
The “bot framework”
Capabilities of the framework
Channels
Deploying & Debugging techniques
Design considerations
Submitting to the marketplace
Tools of the trade