Book Image

Building Bots with Microsoft Bot Framework

By : Kishore Gaddam
Book Image

Building Bots with Microsoft Bot Framework

By: Kishore Gaddam

Overview of this book

Bots help users to use the language as a UI and interact with the applications from any platform. This book teaches you how to develop real-world bots using Microsoft Bot Framework. The book starts with setting up the Microsoft Bot Framework development environment and emulator, and moves on to building the first bot using Connector and Builder SDK. Explore how to register, connect, test, and publish your bot to the Slack, Skype, and Facebook Messenger platforms. Throughout this book, you will build different types of bots from simple to complex, such as a weather bot, a natural speech and intent processing bot, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) bot for a bank, a facial expression recognition bot, and more from scratch. These bots were designed and developed to teach you concepts such as text detection, implementing LUIS dialogs, Cortana Intelligence Services, third-party authentication, Rich Text format, Bot State Service, and microServices so you can practice working with the standard development tools such as Visual Studio, Bot Emulator, and Azure.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Calling

You can build Skype bots that can receive and handle voice calls using the .NET SDK, Node.js SDK, or the Skype API.

Each time a Skype user places a call to your bot, the Skype bot platform will notify the bot using the calling WebHook you specify in Settings. In response, the bot can provide a set of basic actions called a workflow.

These are the supported actions:

  • Answer
  • Play prompt
  • Record audio
  • Speech to text
  • DTMF tones
  • Hang up

The Skype bot platform will execute the actions on the bot's behalf according to the workflow.

If the workflow is successful, Skype will post a result of the last action to your calling WebHook. For example, if the last action was to record an audio message, the result will be audio content.

During a voice call, your bot can decide, after each result, how to continue interaction with the Skype user.

Skype bots with calling enabled are for preview only and cannot currently be published. To publish a bot in Skype, you will need to disable calling in the Skype settings for your bot and then set Published to enable in the bot dashboard. Bots can handle one-to-one calls, but not group calls.