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Showing posts from December, 2016
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Give your Form Flow based chat bot new smarts with LUIS FormFlow  is an attractive API offering for building chat bots in the  Microsoft BOT Framework  in that it greatly simplifies the conversation data management you otherwise need to deal with yourself, to have a useful dialogue with a human. With FormFlow, you set up predefined processes (or  guided conversations ) that you would like your human to navigate through, e.g. Bot: Hello and welcome to Customer Support! Bot: I'm Botty. What is your name? Human: Susan. Botty: Great to meet you, Susan! How can I help you today?   You can ask me to 1.  Get me a Sandwich , 2.  Book an appointment  or 3.  Rant incessantly . Susan: Please get me a sandwich Botty: Are you sure you can handle the  heat ? Susan: Yes Your Hot sandwich is coming right up! The above is accomplished by creating a serializable poco with your  Field s, accompanied by two helper methods to turn the poco into a  Form : [Seriali

Chat bots with the Microsoft Bot Framework

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Chat bots are all the rage these days. As someone who wrote one or two bots back in the day of  IRC  ( mIRC  scripts to be specific), this is a welcome renaissance. I'm planning to write a series on these bots (particularly because I haven't found a way to cover everything I feel you need to understand to be productive - and have fun! - in one post). Bot framework In Microsoft land, a chat bot is an  ASP.NET Web API  Controller which receives a JSON payload, acts on it and returns a JSON payload. The payloads in question are received from - and sent back to -  Microsoft Bot Connector . The connector is responsible for talking to the  channels  where your bot will live. Example channels include Slack ,  Skype ,  Facebook Messenger , the Web (as a embeddable control). An example chat bot API controller, might look something like this: namespace Chatbot { [BotAuthentication] public class MessagesController : ApiController { /// /// POST