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.

1. Introduction to Microsoft
Bot Framework
Sam Fernando (Senior Microsoft Solutions Architect) – ASG Group

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

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

9. Channels

10. It’s
demo
time….

11. How to develop & debug a bot in Visual
Studio

12. How to develop a bot in Azure

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

17. Publishing to Facebook & Cortana

18. Attachments, Rich Cards

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

21. Hand-off to a human
 Assist complex queries
 Bot middleware
 Routing
 Agent recognition
 Supervisor intervention
 Agent only commands

22. Bing Search
QnA Maker
Recommendations API
Vision API
Text Analytics
LUIS
Speech Recognition
Intelligent bots

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

34. More reading..
Bot Framework Portal – https://dev.botframework.com/
Bot Builder SDK - https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder
Bot Builder Emulator - https://github.com/Microsoft/BotFramework-Emulator
LUIS - https://www.luis.ai
QnA Maker - https://qnamaker.ai
Azure Bot Service - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/bot-service/
Cortana Developer Dashboard - https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/cortana/dashboard

35. Questions?

36. Thank you!
 Sam.Fernando@smsmt.com
 linkedin.com/in/samfernandoau
 www.slideshare.net/shamiraf