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” […]
In the last article about bots I covered creating a basic bot using Microsoft’s botframework, setting up Azure, deploying the bot into Azure, and configuring it to work within Skype. In this article we’re going to investigate the various response types available to us in the botframework to develop a more rich conversational experience. Markdown […]
At //Build 2016 Microsoft unleashed something known as the Bot Framework; a set of three products to help you build conversational bots and connect them with services, like Slack, Skype, and even Email and SMS. The Bot Framework has a number of components including the Developer Portal, Bot Builder, and the Bot Directory: Developer Portal […]
This article assumes you have an understanding of what Terraform is, what WebPageTest is and some AWS basics. Have you ever wanted to have your WebPageTest setup managed as infrastructure as code, so you can keep all those carefully tuned changes and custom settings in source control, ready to confidently and repeatedly destroy and rebuild at […]
This article assumes that you know the basics of AWS, WebPageTest, SSH, and at least one linux text editor. When talking to people about website performance stats, I’ll usually split it into Real User Metrics (RUM) and Automated (Synthetic/Test Lab): RUM is performance data reported from the website you own, reported into the analytics tool […]
The fantastic WebPageTest, free to use and public, has been available to set up your own private instances for many years; I wrote this up a while back, and scripted a Terraform version to make this as easy and automated as possible. For AWS it was just a case of creating an EC2 instance (other […]
A few days ago these workmen were using cutting machinery dangerously close to my broadband cables: Shortly after this picture was taken – bang! No internet! They cut the cables while doing their work! Two adults working from home on back to back video calls, one high-schooler also on video classes, and one primary-schooler with […]