This article will cover the following things,
- Brief concepts and prerequisites
- Implementation – Create a new Microsoft Bot Service
- Implementation – Access the Microsoft Bot Service
Brief Concepts
What is Bot?
- Think of a bot as an app that users interact with in a conversational way.
- It can communicate conversationally with text, cards, or speech.
- It may be as simple as basic pattern matching with a response, or it may be a sophisticated weaving of artificial intelligence techniques with complex conversational state tracking and integration to existing business services.
- The Bot Framework enables you to build bots that support different types of interactions with users.
- You can design conversations in your bot to be freeform.
- Your bot can also have more guided interactions where it provides the user choices or actions.
- The conversation can use simple text strings or more complex rich cards that contain text, images, and action buttons
Why use the Bot Framework?
- Developers writing bots all face the same problems: bots require basic I/O, they must have language and dialog skills, and they must connect to users, preferably in any conversation experience and language the user chooses.
- The Bot Framework provides powerful tools and features to help solve these problems.
Prerequisites
Implementation – Create a new Microsoft Bot Service
Steps to be followed,
- Open Azure portal and click on Add >> “Data + Analytics” and then, select an option of “Bot Service”.
- Fill in the details and create a new resource-group followed by clicking on “Create”.
- Go the “All resources” section and see the newly created “Logic App” named as “bot-service -05-09-2017”.
- Open the particular bot-service there and see the different options available.
Implementation – Access the new Bot Service
Steps to be followed,
- In the opened section of the bot-service, click on the “Create Microsoft App ID and password”.
- Click on the “Generate an app password to continue” and copy the App ID and password from there.
- Then, click on “Finish and go back to Bot Framework” capturing the App ID and password with yourself and there, copy-paste both the details and choose C# as language.
- Then, choose a basic template from there and click on “Create Bot” and then wait for a few minutes.
- After that, we will be redirected to this screen where we can see the “Test” option.
- Click on “Test” which opens-up the chat window and write a message there. Click on "Send".
- See the response coming from the bot chat window.
Happy Learning!