During your time building and debugging your botframework chatbot, you’ve probably already come across the annoyance of seeing a huge error message with a ridiculous stack trace that doesn’t seem to relate to your error, or even just a plain old HTTP 500 and big red exclamation mark.. Perhaps you’ve deployed to a production environment […]
We recently wrapped up the first #LDNBotFramework meetup! There were a lot of lessons learned for me, as a first time meetup organiser, and overall I think it was a success. The venue was great; the big video wall in JustEat’s Fleet Place House office combined with a mic and speaker system that “just works”, […]
In the previous LUIS article, I introduced how to set up and train (and publish) a LUIS language interpreting web service, getting an “intent” and extracting “entities” from a given “utterance” In this article I’ll use LUIS to enhance your botframework chatbot If you haven’t done so already, create your bot using botframework, and set […]
If you’re one of the few people who have managed to avoid the onslaught of Chat Bot related articles over the past year, then let me start by way of an introduction; a chatbot is, in it’s most basic form, a computer program that can mimic basic human conversations. This isn’t particularly new or exciting; […]
Creating a hosted bot using Microsoft’s botframework couldn’t be easier; hopefully you’ve had a chance to create one already, and if not there’s a great introduction to creating your first bot right here. In the previous article we saw how to create a QnA (aka FAQ/Knowledge Base) service using a little known QnA Maker service […]
A quick botframework tip – you can include images in your message attachments by Data URI, not just by URL! For example, constructing a message like this: var reply = message.CreateReply(“Here’s a **datauri image attachment**”); reply.Attachments = new List<Attachment> { new Attachment() { ContentUrl = “data:image/jpeg;base64,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”, ContentType = “image/jpg”, Name = “datauri” } }; Gives […]
When talking about the botframework, and chatbots in general, people usually assume that these are all using some clever logic and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to deliver a chunk of business logic via a natural language interface. With the botframework this is most likely implemented by wiring up the Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS): originally […]
No doubt you’re already having lovely long conversations with your bot via Skype (or Facebook Messenger, or even SMS!) built using the botframework, and by using the Bot Emulator you can run your bot locally and debug it. However, once it’s deployed and is being called via the Bot Connector framework, instead of directly, things […]
In the previous botframework article I covered the different types of responses available for the botframework. This article is going to touch on the Dialog and persisting information between subsequent messages. So what’s a Dialog? Dialogs can call child dialogs or send messages to a user. Dialogs are suspended when waiting for a message from […]
The past two articles have been about setting up a botframework bot in Skype and comparing the various Skype clients to see how it’s rendered. In this short article we’ll have a look at configuring the Web Chat client. Web Chat client is enabled by default when you register your bot: If you click “edit” […]