Understanding Bot Service In Azure

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Understanding Bot Service In Azure

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

Read the following article to create an Azure account and for some basic information about Azure to get started.

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!