The document discusses developing conversational agents using Azure services. It covers topics like conversational design, intents, entities, domains, and different channels like text, voice, and virtual reality. It also mentions tools for building conversational agents like LUIS for natural language understanding and Adaptive Cards for cross-platform responses. Finally, it provides an overview of Azure cognitive speech services for capabilities like speech to text, text to speech, and speech translation.

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Azure Saturday 2019
Deep Dive into
Conversational Agent Development

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Two main topics to go deep into
Conversational Design
• Conversational Designer
• Different Channels

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Encouraging the role of conversational designer
Autonomy
Not having
skill IT
No channel
dependency
More text,
less forms

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Let’s talk about intent
• Intent – the action/task the user wants to perform
• Utterance – the sentence where the user expresses the goal
• Entity – words or phrases inside an entity
• Domain –Intents related to a specific type of actions (e.g. Calendar
intents) – prebuilt domains

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What is an intent
The user's intention
The idea behind the
user's action
Every time you
interact with an
application, you
express an intention
The intent is an NLP
concept...
... but intent is
everywhere

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Technically speaking, an intent is...
... a universally
recognized text key
Probably a key
classified in a
domain
.. characterized by a
set of parameters
(called entities) that
argue the intention

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How to Implement Using User Story - Agile
Methodology
• Each Intent is a user story in its own right
• Separation of contexts promotes maintainability
• For each Intent
• Defining sprints, design thinking, and iterations with business users
• Defining Utterances
• Test
• Implementation in BOT
• Api implementation (independent call grouped inconversation contexts by
GW API)
• You don't always need

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Let’s build a Conversation DSL

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Luis Authoring
• LUIS
• Request: utteranceIntent
• Multiple LUIS instances for multiple languages…
• …but one conversation
• There are the answers
• There is the conversation
• www.luis.ai: one app at a time

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Different "channels"
Testo
Voce
Virtual
Reality
• We are meeting different needs
• Text/form
• Desktop/Mobile experience
• Voice
• Mobility/Hand-free experience
• Virtual Reality
• Human simulation experience
• Integration with non-chat-based
facilities
•

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.NET Core 3.0 for Windows Desktop
Deployment Flexibility
Side-by-side deployment, self-
contained EXEs
Install machine global or app local
framework
Windows 10
Access modern Windows 10 APIs
from WPF and WinForms
Use native Windows 10 controls
via XAML islands
Open Source
WPF and WinForms projects also
open source on GitHub
Take advantage of performance,
runtime and API improvements
happening in .NET Core

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Adaptive Cards (https://adaptivecards.io/)
• Portable - To any app, device, and UI
framework
• Open - Libraries and schema are open
source and shared
• Low cost - Easy to define, easy to
consume
• Expressive - Targeted at the long tail
of content that developers want to
produce
• Purely declarative - No code is needed
or allowed
• Automatically styled - To the Host
application UX and brand guidelines

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Cognitive Speech Services overview
Real-time & Batch Mode
single voice, 2-way dialogues or multi-person conversations
Enhanced adaptation
New Call Center specific features
REST for all operations on new Portal!
Over 80 standard voices in 49 locales
Customizable for 9 locales
Neural TTS GA for 4 locales
Available via REST and SDK!
Speech-to-speech translation based on neural machine translation
(NMT) technologies
Available in 10+ locales
Customizable!
Speech SDK 1.5 (out now)
Easy to integrate with the full range of
cloud-based Microsoft Speech services,
creating an end-to-end experience for
customers.
Multi-Platform
Multi-language support
Speech devices SDK
Optimized audio capturing software
stack seamlessly integrated with our
Speech SDK that connects to our
Speech Services
Enable your applications to talk
Swiftly convert audio to text for natural responsiveness
Speech-to-Text
Text-to-Speech
Speech translation
Easily integrate real-time speech translation to your app

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