Tag: qna maker

QnAMaker Sync Library v1 and QnAMaker Dialog v3

garypretty Leave a comment

I am pleased to announce the release of an updated version of the QnAMaker Dialog, allowing you to hook up a Bot Framework Bot and QnAMaker easily, and a brand new open source project, QnAMaker Sync Library, allowing you to sync an external data source to QnAMaker in a snap!

So, let’s look at the two new releases in a little more detail;

QnAMaker Dialog v3

GitHub -> https://github.com/garypretty/botframework/tree/master/QnAMakerDialog
NuGet -> https://www.nuget.org/packages/QnAMakerDialog/

If you haven’t seen the QnAMaker Dialog before, it allows you to take the incoming message text from the bot, send it to your published QnA Maker service, get an answer and send it to the bot user as a reply automatically.  The default implementation is just a few lines of code, but you can also have a little more granular control over the responses from the dialog, such as providing different responses depending on the confidence score returned with the answer from the service.

In the new v3 release, a couple of really significant improvements have been made.

The dialog is now based on v3 of the QnAMaker API (previously it was v1), meaning that when you query your QnAMaker service with the dialog you can now get more than one answer back if multiple answers are found.  This means that for queries which return multiple answers with similar confidence scores, you can potentially offer your user’s a choice of which answer is the best fit for them.

Secondly, v3 of the QnAMaker Service supports the addition of metadata to the items in your knowledgebase and the ability to use this metadata to either filter or boost certain answers.  The metadata is just one or more key/value string pairs, so you can add whatever information you like. e.g. you might add a metadata item called ‘Category’ and set an appropriate value for each answer, which you can then filter on when querying the service to provide a more targeted experience for your users.  The new QnAMaker Dialog release now uses this metadata and allows you to specify metadata items for both filtering and boosting.

More details about the QnAMaker dialog, including code samples for the new features are available over on GitHub.

QnAMaker Sync Library

GitHub -> https://github.com/garypretty/qnamaker-sync
NuGet -> https://www.nuget.org/packages/QnAMakerSync/

When you create a QnAMaker service, you can populate your knowledgebase in a few different ways – manually, automatically extract FAQs from a web page, or upload a tab separated file. However, many of you will already have your FAQ data held somewhere else, such as on your web site in your CMS or maybe within a CRM system.  What happens when you update the information in your other system? You probably need to go and manually update the knowledgebase in your QnAMaker service too, which isn’t great.  Added to this is the fact that behind the scenes (as mentioned above in the QnAMaker Dialog section), the QnAMaker service supports adding metadata to your QnA data to help you filter or boost certain answers when querying the service. The big problem right now though is that the QnAMaker portal doesn’t yet support the latest APIs and therefore you can’t add metadata through the UI.

So, what do you do?  Well, there are a set of APIs available for you to manage your knowledgebase, which includes metadata support, so you could go and write some code to integrate QnAMaker with your web site or repository – but there is no need now, because the QnAMaker Sync Library should hopefully have you covered!

The C# library allows you to simply write just the code needed to get your QnA items from wherever they are (e.g. FAQ pages on your site) and use them to build a list of QnAItems (a class included in the library).  Once you have this list, you then simply pass it to the QnAMaker Sync library (along with your knowledgebase and subscription ID) and voila, your data will be pushed into the QnAMaker service.  What’s more, when you build the list of QnAItems, you pass a unique reference for each item so that it can be identified in your original repository (e.g. a page ID from your web site) and these references are used the next time we sync so that we know which items to update and which to delete.

Full details as well as code samples are available over on GitHub and the library is now available via NuGet as well.

 

Forwarding activities / messages to other dialogs in Microsoft Bot Framework

garypretty 7 Comments

I have been asked a question a lot recently – is it possible to pass messages / activities between dialogs in Microsoft Bot Framework?  By doing this you could have a root dialog handling your conversation, but then hand off the message activity to another dialog.  One common example of this is using the LUIS service to recognise a user’s intent, but handing off to a dialog powered by the QnA Maker service if no intent is triggered.

Thankfully this is very simple to do.

Normally to add a new dialog to the stack we would use context.call which adds a dialog to the top of the stack. However, there is another method which was added some time ago but is not as widely known, context.forward, allowing us to not only call a child dialog and add it to the stack, but also let us pass an item to the dialog as well, just as if it was the root dialog receiving a message activity.

The example code below shows you how to forward to fallback to a dialog that uses the QnA Maker if no intent is identified within a LUIS dialog.

In the example above, a new instance of the FaqDialog class is created and the forward method takes the incoming message (which you can get as a parameter from the LUIS intent handler), passes it to the new dialog and also specifies a callback for when the new child dialog has completed, in this case AfterFAQDialog.

Once it has finished, the AfterFAQDialog will call context.Done and in the example will pass a Boolean to indicate if an FAQ answer was found – if the dialog returns false then we can provide an appropriate message to the user.

That’s it, it is super simple and unlocks the much asked for scenario of using LUIS and QnAMaker together, falling back from one to the other.

TechDays Online 2017 Bot Framework / Cognitive Services now available

garypretty Leave a comment

This February saw the return of TechDays Online here in the UK, along with other sessions from across the pond in the U.S.  I co-presented 2 sessions on bot framework development along with Simon Michael from Microsoft and fellow MVP James Mann.  The sessions covered some great advice about bot development and dug a little deeper into subjects including FormFlow and the QnA Maker / LUIS cognitive services.

Both sessions are now available to watch online, along with tons of other great content from the rest of the 3 days.

Conversational UI using the Microsoft Bot Framework

Microsoft Bot Framework and Cognitive Services: Make your bot smarter!

Another fellow MVP, Robin Osborne, also recorded some short videos about his experience in building a real world bot for a leading brand, JustEat, so check them out over on his blog too.

Adding rich attachments to your QnAMaker bot responses

garypretty 11 Comments

Recently I released a dialog, available via NuGet, called the QnAMaker dialog. This dialog allows you to integrate with the QnA Maker service from Microsoft, part of the Cognitive Services suite, which allows you to quickly build, train and publish a question and answer bot service based on FAQ URLs or structured lists of questions and answers.

Today I am releasing an update to this dialog which allows you to add rich attachments to your QnAMaker responses to be served up by your bot.  For example, you might want to provide the user with a useful video to go along with an FAQ answer. Read More

QnA Maker Dialog for Bot Framework

garypretty 39 Comments

Update: The QnA Maker Dialog v3 is now available.  It adds support for v3 of the Microsoft QnA Maker API, including returning multiple answers and use of metadata to filter / boost answers that are returned.  You can read more about this and a new QnA Maker Sync library that is now also available on the announcement blog here.  Also, I have previously released an update to the QnAMakerDialog which supports adding rich media attachments to your Q&A responses.

The QnA Maker service from Microsoft, part of the Cognitive Services suite, allows you to quickly build, train and publish a question and answer bot service based on FAQ URLs or structured lists of questions and answers. Once published you can call a QnA Maker service using simple HTTP calls and integrate it with applications, including bots built on the Bot Framework.

Right now, out of the box, you will need to roll your own code / dialog within your bot to call the QnA Maker service. The new QnAMakerDialog which is now available via NuGet aims to make this integration even easier, by allowing you to integrate with the service in just a couple of minutes with virtually no code.

The QnAMakerDialog allows you to take the incoming message text from the bot, send it to your published QnA Maker service and send the answer sent back from the service to the bot user as a reply. You can add the new QnAMakerDialog to your project using the NuGet package manager console with the following command, or by searching for it using the NuGet Manager in Visual Studio.

Below is an example of a class inheriting from QnAMakerDialog and the minimal implementation.

When no matching answer is returned from the QnA service a default message, “Sorry, I cannot find an answer to your question.” is sent to the user. You can override the NoMatchHandler method to send a customised response.

For many people the default implementation will be enough, but you can also provide more granular responses for when the QnA Maker returns an answer, but is not confident in the answer (indicated using the score returned in the response between 0 and 100 with the higher the score indicating higher confidence). To do this you define a custom hanlder in your dialog and decorate it with a QnAMakerResponseHandler attribute, specifying the maximum score that the handler should respond to.

Below is an example with a customised method for when a match is not found and also a hanlder for when the QnA Maker service indicates a lower confidence in the match (using the score sent back in the QnA Maker service response). In this case the custom handler will respond to answers where the confidence score is below 50, with any obove 50 being hanlded in the default way. You can add as many custom handlers as you want and get as granular as you need.

Hopefully you will find the new QnAMakerDialog useful when building your bots and I would love to hear your feedback. The dialog is open source and available in my GitHub repo, along side the other additional dialog I have created for the Bot Framework, BestMatchDialog (also available on NuGet).

I will be publishing a walk through of creating a service with the QnA Maker in a separate post in the near future, but if you are having trouble with that, or indeed the QnAMakerDialog, in the mean time then please feel free to reach out.