Develop Your Own Basic Bot Service Using Microsoft Azure

Introduction

One of the basic requirements in writing your own Bot Service is to seed it with questions and answers ( for chat windows). In many cases, the questions and answers already exist in content like FAQ URLs/documents, etc. Using this content, we can develop our own Bot Service using Microsoft Azure. In this article, I will explain how to develop your own basic Bot service using Microsoft Azure.

Steps to create Bot service

1. Go here and create your Azure AD account by clicking on Azure AD in Office 365 Admin Center.
   
   
   
   
2. After completing your registration process, it will take us to Microsoft Azure home page.
   
   
   
   
3. Click on “+ New” in the left side menu bar.
   
   
   
   
4. In "New" menu, go to “Intelligence + Analytics” category.
   
   
   
   
5. Click on “Bot Service” to create new bot service in Azure.
   
   
   
   
6. Give unique name for Bot in “App Name” field and create new “Resource Group”. Click on "Create" button.
   
   
   
   
7. Deployment has been started and it will take a few minutes to complete the deployment process. We can see the status of deployment by clicking on notification bell icon on top menu bar.
   
   
   
   
8. After successful completion of deployment, the below page will appear.
   
   
   
   
9. To create App ID and password, click “Create Microsoft App ID and password” button to register your bot service with Microsoft.
   
   
   
   
10. It takes us to https://apps.dev.microsoft.com where we need to login with Microsoft account.
    
    
    
    
11. Click on “Generate an app password to continue” to generate password and copy the password. Click on "OK" button.
    
    
    
    
12. Click on “Finish and go back to bot framework” button.
    
    
    
    
13. Enter the generated password in password field.
    
14. Select the language for Bot service. In this example, I have selected C# language for my bot service.
    
    
15. Select the template type of your Bot service. In this example, I have selected “Basic” for my bot service.
    
    
    
    
16. Finally, click on “Create bot” button to create the bot service.
    
    
    
    
17. It will take a few minutes to create bot service.
    
18. After the Bot service generates your basic bot, the Microsoft Azure editor will contain your bot’s source files and we can modify the source code and save the changes.
    
    
    
    
19. We can use chat window to test our new basic bot that's been created.
    
     

Summary

Thus, you have learned how to develop your own basic Bot service using Microsoft Azure.