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)

How to use FormFlow in the bot application

The main purpose of FormFlow is to provide more simplified, guided conversations. This gives more flexibility and avoids ambiguity in the conversation. It has helped to review the progress so far. It has limitations compared to dialogs, but in a way that requires less effort. With the combination of dialogs and LUIS dialogs, we can get the best of both worlds.

Dialogs can be are very powerful and flexible, but it can take lot of efforts in handling a guided conversation, like ordering a pizza. At any point in dialog one can contemplate various possibilities of what's next. You may be required to provide the clarification about an ambiguity, help options, go back, or display the progress.

In order to ease out the process of building the guided conversations, the framework comes with the powerful dialog building block known as FormFlow. Some of the flexibilities provided...