What Is A Chatbot?

A chatbot is a service, leveraging artificial intelligence technologies, that you interact with via a chat interface.  While a Chatbot can be functional, it can also be Fun and Interactive. In this Digital age, with a plethora of tools available, one can build a Chatbot under 30 minutes for almost anything. For example, you can build a Chatbot to order shoes from Timberlands, or hail a cab service, buy online movie tickets, etc. With bots, the possibilities are truly endless!

Examples of Chat Bots

Here are some other examples of what a Chatbot can be used for:

• Weather bot. Get the weather whenever you ask.
• Grocery bot. Help me pick out and order groceries for the week.
• News bot. Ask it to tell you when ever something interesting happens.
• Life advice bot. I’ll tell it my problems and it helps me think of solutions.
• Personal finance bot. It helps me manage my money better.
• Scheduling bot. Get me a meeting with someone on the Messenger team at Facebook.
• A bot that’s your friend. In China there is a bot called Xiaoice, built by Microsoft, that over 20 million people talk to…YES!

How To Build Chatbots

While building a Chatbot may sound a daunting task, it’s totally doable! That’s True. Sounds simple enough? Then read on….

You will need to figure out the problem that you are going to solve with your Bot, then choose which platform your bot will live on (Facebook, Slack, etc), thereafter, set up a server to run your bot from, and finally, choose which service you will use to build your Chatbot. There are numerous services you can choose from such as IBM’s Watson, Motion.ai, Octane AI, Gupshup, etc; however, we will be showcasing today how to build a Chatbot using Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Microsoft Bot Framework, because you can create a rapid intelligent bot that can run in serverless environment. 

Microsoft’s Bot Framework is designed to help you build and deploy chat-based bots across a range of services, including non-Microsoft platforms and through open web and SMS gateways, with minimal coding. Since Microsoft released its Bot Framework as part of its “conversational computing” push at its Build 2016 developer event, it has continued to regularly update the service, adding new features and functions.

While the Azure Bot Service simplifies building and deploying Bots, LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) is a fascinating tool, one of the more important elements driving free-form conversational bots. It’s designed to interpret the intent of a user’s conversation. Hence, these are called “conversational chatbots”!

In this Webinar, you will learn how to create a Bot using Microsoft Bot Framework and LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) and enable it on your website through Web Chat channels. So sit tight and enjoy the ride…….:))