In this article by Kishore Gaddam, author of the book Building Bots with Microsoft Bot Framework, we introduced what is Microsoft Bot Framework and how it helps in the development of bots.

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

Since past several decades, the corporate, government, and business world has experienced several waves of IT architecture foundations, moving from mainframes, to minicomputers, to distributed PCs, to the Internet, to social/mobile and now the Cloud/Internet of Thuings (IoT) Stack. We call this the Sixth wave of Corporate IT, and like its predecessors, Cloud and IoT technologies are causing significant disruption and displacement, even while it drives new levels of productivity. Each architecture focused on key business processes and supported killer technology applications to drive new levels of value. Very soon we will be looking at an enormous networked interconnection of everyday machines to one another, as well as to humans.

Machine-to-machine-to-human connectivity will have a profound impact on the consumer and corporate IT experience. As these machines become social and talkto us, we have enormous opportunity to greatly enhance their value proposition through improved product quality, customer experience, and lowered cost of operations. A heightened consumer expectation for more personal and real-time interactions is driving business to holistically embrace the next wave of technology innovation like Cloud, IoT, and Bots to boost business performance. In this age of billions of connected devices, there is a need for such a technology where our apps could talk back, like bots? Bots that have specific purposes and talk to any device or any app or to anyone, Bots that live in cloud, Bots that we can talk to you via any communication channel such as email, text, voice, chat, and others. Bots can go where no apps have gone before when it comes to machine-to-machine-to-human connectivity. And to make this happen we will need a whole new platform. A Platform for Conversations.

Conservation as a Service (CaaS)

Messaging apps in general are becoming a second home screen for many people, acting as their entry point into the internet. And where the youngins are, the brands will follow. Companies are coming to messaging apps as bots and apps, to offer everything from customer service to online shopping and banking.

Conversations are shaping up be the next major human-computer interface. Thanks to advances in natural language processing and machine learning, the tech is finally getting fast and accurate enough to be viable. Imagine a platform where language is the new UI layer. When we talk about conversation as a platform, there are 3 parts:

• There are people talking to people – Skype translator as an ex where people can communicate across cross languages
• Then there is the presence or being able to enhance a conversation by the ability to be present and interact remotely
• Then there is personal assistance and the bots

Think of Bots as the new mechanism that you can converse with. Instead of looking through multiple mobile apps or pages and pages of websites, you can call on any application as a bot within the conversational canvas. Bots are the new apps and digital assistants are the meta apps. This way intelligence is infused into all our interactions.

This leads us to Microsoft Bot Framework, which is a comprehensive offering from Microsoft to build and deploy high quality bots for your users to interact using Conversation as a Platform (CaaP). This is a framework that lets you build and connect intelligent bots. The idea is that they interact naturally wherever your users are talking, like Skype, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Text/SMS, and others. Basically any kind of channel that you use today as a human being to talk to other people, well, you will be able to use them to talk to bots all using natural language.

Microsoft Bot Framework is a Microsoft operated CaaP service and an open source SDK. Bot Framework is one of the many tools Microsoft is offering to for building a complete Bot. Other tools include Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS), Speech APIs, Microsoft Azure, Cortana Intelligence Suit and many more.

Your Bot

The Microsoft Bot Builder SDK is one of three main components of the Microsoft Bot Framework. First you have to build your bot. Your bot lives in the cloud and you host it yourself. You write it just like a web service component using Node.js or C#, like a ASP.NET WebAPI component. Microsoft Bot builder SDK is open source and so you will have more languages and web stack get supported over time. Your bot will have its own logic, but you also need a conversation logic using dialogs to model a conversation. The Bot builder SDK gives you facilities for this and there are many types of dialogs that are included from simple Yes/No questions to full natural language understanding or LUIS, which is one of the API’s provided in Microsoft Cognitive Services:

Bot Connector

Bot Connector is hosted and operated by Microsoft. Think of it as a central router between your bots and many channels to communicate with your bots. Apart from routing messages, it would be managing state within the conversation. The Bot Connector is an easy way to create a single back-end and then publish to a bunch of different platforms called channels.

Bot Directory

Bot Directory is where user will be able to find bots. It’s like app store for mobile apps. The Bot Directory is a public directory of all reviewed bots registered through the developer portal. Users will be able to discover, try, and add bots to their favorite conversation experiences from the Bot Directory. Anyone can access it and anyone can submit Bots to the directory.

As you begin your development with Microsoft Bot Framework, you might be wondering how to best get started. Bots can be built in C#, however, Microsoft’s Bot Framework can also be used to build bots using Node.js. For developing any bots, we need to first setup the development environment and have the right tools installed for successfully developing and deploying a bot. Let’s see how we can setup a development environment using Visual Studio.

Setting up development environment

Let’s first look at the Prerequisites required to set up the development environment:

Prerequisites

To use the Microsoft Bot Framework Connector, you must have:

1. A Microsoft Account (Hotmail, Live, or Outlook) to log into the Bot Framework developer portal, which you will use to register your Bot.
2. An Azure subscription (Free trial: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/). This Azure subscription is essential for having an Azure-accessible REST endpoint exposing a callback for the Connector service.
3. Developer accounts on one or more communication services (such as Skype, Slack, Facebook) where your Bot will communicate.

In addition, you may wish to have an Azure App Insights account so you can capture telemetry from your Bot. There are additionally different ways to go about building a Bot; from scratch, coded directly to the Bot Connector REST API, the Bot Builder SDK’s for Node.js and .NET, and the Bot Connector .NET template which is what this quick start guide demonstrates.

Setting up Bot Framework Connector SDK .NET

This is a step-by-step guide to setting up dev environment to develop a Bot in C# using the Bot Framework Connector SDK .NET template:

1. Install prerequisite software

   1. Visual Studio 2015 (latest update) – you can download the community version here for free: www.visualstudio.com
   2. Important: Please update all Visual Studio extensions to their latest versions to do so navigate to Tools | Extensions and Updates | Updates
2. Download and install the Bot Application template:
   1. Download the file from the direct download link at http://aka.ms/bf-bc-vstemplate
   2. Save the zip file to your Visual Studio 2015 templates directory which is traditionally in %USERPROFILE%DocumentsVisual Studio 2015TemplatesProjectTemplatesVisual C#
3. Open Visual Studio.
4. Create a new C# project using the new Bot Application template.

   

5. The template is a fully functional Echo Bot that takes the user’s text utterance as input and returns it as output. In order to run however:
   1. The bot has to be registered with Bot Connector
   2. The AppId and AppPassword from the Bot Framework registration page have to be recorded in the project’s web.config
   3. The project needs to be published to the web

Emulator

Use the Bot Framework Emulator to test your Bot application. The Bot Framework provides a channel emulator that lets you test calls to your Bot as if it were being called by the Bot Framework cloud service. To install the Bot Framework Emulator, download it from https://download.botframework.com/bf-v3/tools/emulator/publish.html.

One installed, you’re ready to test. First, start your Bot in Visual Studio using a browser as the application host. The following screenshot uses Microsoft Edge:

Summary

In this article, we introduced what is Microsoft Bot Framework and how it helps in the development of bots. Also, we have seen how to setup development environment, Emulator and the tools needed for programming. This article is based on the thought that programming knowledge and experience grow best when they grow together. 

Resources for Article:

Further resources on this subject:

• Talking to Bot using Browser [article]
• Webhooks in Slack [article]
• Creating our first bot, WebBot [article]