Series introduction
Welcome to a new series of short articles I am presenting about Artificial Intelligence specifically in the Azure AI stack. The objective is that you will learn about an Azure-based AI service in no more than one minute and thus quickly get familiar with the entire stack over a short period of time. These are going to be short, easily digestible articles, so let's get started!
What is Azure Bot Service?
Bots
Bots are a type of software which uses conversational AI, thus allowing people to have conversations with them in online chat or in a chat tool. Bots can be used to carry out simple repetitive tasks such as taking bookings or gathering profile information in a relatively natural conversational manner, thus automating a system so that it no longer requires humans to carry out these tasks. They are commonly used in the banking, travel and entertainment industries. Bots, because they are a type of software, can also carry out the same actions as other types of software, such as reading and writing files, doing computational tasks and using databases and APIs. However, building and deploying an effective bot can be a time-consuming process.
Azure Bot Service
Azure Bot Service speeds up and simplifies the development of bots by providing an integrated bot development environment and templates for different scenarios. SDKs exist for C#, Typescript and JavaScript, among others. You can add Cognitive Services to your bots to enable them to recognize users in photos, translate language and moderate content.
Information Chatbot
Azure Bot Service also offers:
- SDK Bot Framework for developing bots
- Bot Framework Tools to cover end-to-end bot development workflow
- Bot Framework Service (BFS) to send and receive messages and events between bots and channels
- Bot deployment and channel configuration in Azure
You can build a bot and auto-provision it on Azure and then integrate it across multiple channels, such as Facebook Messenger, Kik, Skype, text/SMS, Twilio, Cortana and Slack, among others. Alternatively, you can embed the bot in a web page or in an app.
Azure Bot Service offers additional components to extend the functionality of your bot.
Find out more,