Prototyping bots with Microsoft QnA Maker
Microsoft's QnA Maker allows you to go from FAQ to Bot in minutes! by copying and pasting the URL to an existing FAQ web page or uploading a set of questions and answers tsv-file (tab-separated file). There's a nice quick start video that you can watch here.
In this post, I will focus on using the QnA Maker to prototype a more elaborate bot - one that would need a hefty dose of LUIS and (Microsoft's) other Cognitive Services if built "for real". What I'm talking about, is a pre-written chat script:
When we (the human), say "Hello?", the QnA service will return "Ah, hello there! How can I help you today?". As you can imagine, putting these phrases together takes a lot less time than to write a bot (refer to my other articles here)! But yet, with this simple configuration, we have something that is immediately testable, demoable and something we can use as a base for further discussion. Let's step over to the Test section of the QnA portal and see how our bot behaves:
It didn't understand "Hi", so we wrote "Hello" instead and added an alternate phrasing of "hi" for our next demo/training session:
Then, though, the bot just got it:
Even though we wrote "I'm hungry", QnA maker figured out that we wanted the response to "I'm curious about your specials". Mentioning salad, resulted in the drink "response". And, finally, "Water" triggered the "Coming right up!" response.
In just a few minutes, we have a proof of concept up and running that we can talk to our colleagues about and iterate around.
That's one application of Microsoft's QnA Maker.
In this post, I will focus on using the QnA Maker to prototype a more elaborate bot - one that would need a hefty dose of LUIS and (Microsoft's) other Cognitive Services if built "for real". What I'm talking about, is a pre-written chat script:
When we (the human), say "Hello?", the QnA service will return "Ah, hello there! How can I help you today?". As you can imagine, putting these phrases together takes a lot less time than to write a bot (refer to my other articles here)! But yet, with this simple configuration, we have something that is immediately testable, demoable and something we can use as a base for further discussion. Let's step over to the Test section of the QnA portal and see how our bot behaves:
It didn't understand "Hi", so we wrote "Hello" instead and added an alternate phrasing of "hi" for our next demo/training session:
Then, though, the bot just got it:
Even though we wrote "I'm hungry", QnA maker figured out that we wanted the response to "I'm curious about your specials". Mentioning salad, resulted in the drink "response". And, finally, "Water" triggered the "Coming right up!" response.
In just a few minutes, we have a proof of concept up and running that we can talk to our colleagues about and iterate around.
That's one application of Microsoft's QnA Maker.
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