{"id":1103,"date":"2017-02-23T14:29:54","date_gmt":"2017-02-23T05:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sonicviz.com\/?p=1103"},"modified":"2017-02-24T12:03:26","modified_gmt":"2017-02-24T03:03:26","slug":"1103","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sonicviz.com\/2017\/02\/23\/1103\/","title":{"rendered":"Chatbot development with Azure Bot Service"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Chatbot development and deployment<\/h2>\n

There’s a lot of hype at the moment about AI in general, and chatbot’s being the next big “app market”. Reality is the tech is still very immature and there are not a lot of use cases where the chatbot workflow is a better UX than simple point and click with a well defined menu and information architecture.<\/p>\n

FAQ’s are an important corner of the customer support sector and is one area where they may have use so I decided to test out Microsoft’s bot service, which is still in preview mode: https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/services\/bot-service\/<\/a><\/p>\n

I created an FAQ chatbot for one of my own products as a practical test, which you can see running live here: http:\/\/www.harpninja.com\/wp\/faqhelp\/<\/a>
\nAs you can see from the image there’s quite a bit to it, architecturally and technology wise, with a number of different services from NLU (Natural Language Understanding) to the bot development to connecting various user touchpoint services. There are a number of different types of bots you can implement and an FAQ bot is best implemented using another service they have called https:\/\/qnamaker.ai<\/a><\/p>\n

Overall it’s a pretty nice developer workflow considering the different services they have hooked up to make the development and deployment a relatively painless experience. This FAQ chatbot is using their inbuilt web chat preview which made it a snap to integrate into WordPress without having to code up a plugin. The bot has also been deployed to Skype, Slack, and Facebook Messenger<\/a>.<\/p>\n

There’s a lot of different options for developing chatbots, which this article gives a great overview of: https:\/\/www.oreilly.com\/ideas\/bots-what-you-need-to-know<\/a> , but I would definitely recommend Microsoft (the new Apple!).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chatbot development and deployment There’s a lot of hype at the moment about AI in general, and chatbot’s being the next big “app market”. Reality is the tech is still very immature and there are not a lot of use cases where the chatbot workflow is a better UX than simple point and click with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_import_markdown_pro_load_document_selector":0,"_import_markdown_pro_submit_text_textarea":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,62,51],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nChatbot development with Azure Bot Service - Sonicviz<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Chatbot development with Azure Bot Service\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sonicviz.com\/2017\/02\/23\/1103\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Chatbot development with Azure Bot Service - 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