Bots + LUIS = Sexy!

A bot is conversation user interface!! Bots and conversation agents are increasingly becoming an integral part of one’s digital experience – 
they are a new and an important way for users to interact with a service or application. Some of great bots in the market are Siri, Cortona, Google Now. I have seen another very cool one on www.ikea.com

Over the weekend, I built another bot using Microsoft’s Bot development framework. This bot I built using the Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS), a cognitive API.

Building a bot is not that difficult given the amount of examples available on Bot’s web site. These bots can easily be integrated with existing APIs that organizations already have published whether internal/external. However, the most exciting thing about Bots is its use with LUIS. The deployment of the Bot is relatively similar to SharePoint's’ provider hosted App model. The bot needs to deployed in Azure Web App.  It requires several standard steps to register the bot and then it can be used publicly. Alternatively, we can use the Bot emulator for testing purposes.

As some of you may know, I recently changed jobs. I thought this would be a great personal assistant (bot) to help me ask questions and get answers for various links and other information about the organization.

At present, I enabled the Bot to use Email & Skype channel. You can enable the bot to use other channels like Facebook, Twilo, WebChat, GroupMe,Telegram, Kik, DirectLine.

One of the things that impressed me the most was LUIS and its inbuilt capabilities to train itself and its inbuilt support for different languages.  In my application, I defined a single English utterance [Hello], but when I texted Bot in different languages it responded correctly!! It can be trained to even match regular expressions and different sentences having a similar meaning. When you build an application in LUIS, it generates an API that you can refer in your Bot using LUIS specific arguments.

It is a combination of few technologies that deliver a great bot that is useful to the end user.

In summary, the Bots are here to stay!! They can be programmed to answer any type of questions, track shipments, track orders, help find items on websites, guide visitors and many more things using various channels and Azure cognitiveAPIs (including Speech)