Uncategorised – Page 2

Integrating a LUIS natural language model with your bot using LUISDialog

25th July 201625th July 2016 garypretty 22 Comments

The LUIS service, part of the Cognitive Services suite, aids you with the task of natural language processing. In my last post I created a natural language model using Microsoft’s LUIS service and in this post I am going to show you how to hook up the model I created, into a bot created using the Bot Framework and a special type of dialog class, the LUIS Dialog. If you haven’t got a LUIS model already, go back and work through the last post, it really doesn’t take long.

Update: I have now published a quick video overview of LUIS including how to create your first model.

Using the Microsoft LUIS service to build a model to understand natural language input

20th July 201620th July 2016 garypretty Leave a comment

LUIS, the Language Understanding Intelligence Service, is a part of Microsoft’s Cognitive Services suite. If you are reading this and you don’t yet have a clear understanding of what Cognitive Services are, head over and read my introduction to Cognitive Services before you continue.

During this post I will introduce you to what the LUIS service is and show you how to build a model to aid in natural language understanding in your applications.

Update: I have now published a quick video overview of LUIS including how to create your first model. Read More

Bot Framework Typing Activity – Let users know your bot is responding (and know when they are too)

18th July 201618th July 2016 garypretty 11 Comments

In the recent major update to the Microsoft Bot Framework (v3), a new type of Activity was introduced, a Typing activity. This Activity type sites along side others, such as Message activity which is the most commonly used activity to represent most communications between a bot and a user.

So, what is the Typing activity for and how do you use it? Read More

What are Microsoft’s Cognitive Services?

18th July 201618th July 2016 garypretty Leave a comment

Some things are just hard. As a developer, tasks such as recognising a face within a photo or understanding speech are just things that, in general, you cannot do on your own own. These sorts of capabilities though, could significantly transform the experiences you offer in your apps. Imagine being able to write a kiosk app that instantly knew who the user was just by seeing their face or being able to have a user ask a question and understand what they were asking without writing reams and reams on limiting regular expressions. Some time ago at Microsoft a project got underway to solve this problem, codenamed Project Oxford, the idea was simple – bring the power of machine learning that can only be harnessed by an entity of a similar scale to Microsoft, to developers to use anywhere, anytime.

Creating your first bot with the Microsoft Bot Framework – Part 2 – publishing and chatting through Skype

16th July 201616th July 2016 garypretty 4 Comments

In the previous post of this 2 part tutorial, I demonstrated how you could build a bot using the Bot Framework and the included Bot Application template. I also went through testing the bot locally using the Bot Framework Channel Emulator. So, if you haven’t already got a bot working locally ready to publish then check out Creating your first bot with the Microsoft Bot Framework – Part 2 – build and test locally.

In this post I am going to show you how you can register your bot in the Bot Framework Portal, publish it to Azure and then talk with it through Skype. Very cool stuff. Read More

Creating your first bot with the Microsoft Bot Framework – Part 1 – Build and test locally

14th July 201614th July 2016 garypretty Leave a comment

In my last post, I provided a high level introduction to the Microsoft Bot Framework and the main constituent parts that make up the framework. If you don’t yet know what the Bot Framework is, or you need a quick refresher, then you should check out that post.

Today though, I am going to show you how you can create your first bot using .NET / C#. By the end of this post you will have a simple bot running and will be able to test it locally using the Bot Framework Channel Emulator, an excellent tool provided for testing your bots. Read More

Introduction to the Microsoft Bot Framework

13th July 201613th July 2016 garypretty 1 Comment

Back at the end of March, at their annual Build conference, Microsoft announced the Bot Framework. As I have been working with the framework for a couple of months now since it was announced. This post is intended to give you a bird’s eye view of what the Bot Framework is and what you can do with it, with me going into more granular details in later posts.

Video: The future of Office 365 – An update from Microsoft Ignite 2015

1st October 20151st October 2015 garypretty Leave a comment