Building Bots with Microsoft Bot Framework

by Kishore Gaddam

Overview

Build intelligent and smart conversational interfaces using Microsoft Bot Framework

About This Book

• Develop various real-world intelligent bots from scratch using Microsoft Bot Framework
• Integrate your bots with most popular conversation platforms such as Skype, Slack, and Facebook Messenger
• Flaunt your bot building skills in your organization by thoroughly understanding and implementing the bot development concepts such as messages (rich text and pictures), dialogs, and third-party authentication and calling

Who This Book Is For

This book is for developers who are keen on building powerful services with great and interactive bot interface. Experience with C# is needed.

What You Will Learn

• Set up a development environment and install all the required software to get started programming a bot
• Publish a bot to Slack, Skype, and the Facebook Messenger platform
• Develop a fully functional weather bot that communicates the current weather in a given city
• Help your bot identify the intent of a text with the help of LUIS in order to make decisions
• Integrate an API into your bot development
• Build an IVR solution
• Explore the concept of MicroServices and see how MicroServices can be used in bot development
• Develop an IoT project, deploy it, and connect it to a bot

In Detail

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.

Style and approach

This step-by-step guide takes a learn-while-doing approach, delivering the practical knowledge and experience you need to design and build real-world Bots. The concepts come to you on an as-needed basis while developing a bot so you increase your programming knowledge and experience at the same time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786463104
Publisher:	Packt Publishing
Publication date:	05/31/2017
Pages:	424
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.86(d)

About the Author

Kishore Gaddam is the CEO and a co-founder of Astrani Technologies and is recognized as an industry expert in mobile, cloud, and bot software development. He is a forward-thinking technology leader with 17+ years of international experience in building technology organizations, strategic planning, rolling out multiple platforms/products, IT program and project management, strategy and transformation (businesses, people, processes, and technologies), and growing business units across IoT, smart cities, NLP, AI, bots, cloud, robotics, mobile, healthcare, industrial automation, financial systems, retail, procurement (EPC), travel & leisure, logistics, manufacturing, and automotive domains.

He is a champion of the technical pre-sales, architecture, and software development of enterprise Azure IoT/bot/web applications using cognitive services, microservices, Service Fabric, Azure IoT Hub, Stream Analytics, Cortana Intelligence Suit, Logic Apps, Notification Hubs, Big Data, Azure Web Apps, Azure App service, Azure API Apps, Application Insights, API Management, Machine Learning, Azure SQL databases, Cosmos DB, Data Factory, Data Lake, HD Insight, Redis Cache, Key Vault, and Azure Service Bus, and a champion of implementing DevOps using Azure, PowerShell scripts, ARM templates, and VSTS. He has huge experience in startup leadership, including building teams, and developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with little to no supervision. Kishore is comfortable at all layers of the startup people stack, from individual contributor (software development, product management) to CxO.

Kishore graduated in Technology Entrepreneurship from Stanford University, CA, and is a speaker at various conferences in the USA. Kishore is the author of the popular Microsoft Technologies blog. He has a love for mentoring and a passion for sharing new tools, programming languages, and technology trends at national conferences, regional code camps, local user groups, meetups, and hackathons.