Artificial intelligence has become deeply embedded in our business processes. We want our systems to be faster, smarter, and nicer, which makes the competition so intense that we do not want to give any chance to our competitor to have an edge over us in Sales, Customer Service, marketing or any other business field.
Microsoft’s Bot framework plays an important role in accomplishing this task. It helps us build great and smart bots, which can talk to humans in so natural way that our customers are not able to recognize that they are actually talking to machines. The company is working hard to simplify programming, and developing tools to help us build such smart machines.
Microsoft Bot Framework - The Framework has three main components - 1. The Bot Builder SDK is an open source, helps us build prompts and command dialogs, rich attachments support, emulator provider, cognitive services to understand and interpret user needs. 2. Developer Portal is used for registering, connecting, publishing, and managing Bots. You can connect them to various channels like Skype, Web (Chat control), SMS, Email etc. 3. Bot Directory - You can register and publish your BOT with public directory to encourage users to try it via the web chat control.
Explaining Chatbots - They are computer programs that help users get their questions answered without human assistance. They are built using the Microsoft Bot Framework. There are some other ways to build them as well, but I am currently focusing on these tools and techniques. The Chat bots talk to the people using artificial language. A series of questions and answers are injected into them using FormFlow and Dialogs, and the use of LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) makes them smarter to understand what user is actually looking for. Your Chatbot is able to detect what a user wants to do by identifying their intent.
In my technical book : Smart Bots for Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, I have illustrated how to develop a Bot. Registering in the Framework Portal, publishing to Azure, and then connecting it to Skype. That's an Echo bot. It repeats whatever I write and send. Then I have further enhanced its use by creating its access via Azure Active Directory to CRM Web services to let it automatically create a lead in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, using various codes and dialogs in Visual Studio to answer certain questions related to sales management.
