Monthly Archives: February 2017

5 Cool Chatbots: Feb 2017 Edition

ChristopherBot (Facebook)

Never forget your homework again

I have to include this bot first; it’s received a lot of press over the past few weeks, and rightly so. A great little concept from a 14 year old schoolboy who was forever forgetting about his homework. He created a Facebook messenger chatbot in Ruby and hosted on Heroku to help him (and you!) keep track of work that’s pending.

ChristopherBot

Read more about ChristopherBot on the BBC and try it out over at christopherbot.co. You can view the code (mainly Ruby) over on GitHub – annoyingly good code from someone so young! He puts me to shame..

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Virtual Shop Assistant Chatbot with Amazing Image Recognition

There has been some significant progress in “deep learning”, AI, and image recognition over the past couple of years; Google, Microsoft, and Amazon each have their own service offering. But what is the service like? How useful is it?

Everyone’s having a go at making a chatbot this year (and if you’re not, perhaps you should contact me for consultancy or training!) – and although there are some great examples out there, I’ve not seen much in the e-commerce sector worth talking about.

In this article I’m going to show you a cool use case for an image recognition e-commerce chatbot via a couple of clever APIs wired together by botframework.

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MVP led TechDays Online

MVP led TechDays Online

On February 20th to 22nd you’ll be able to join MVPs like me at the 3 day online conference UK Tech Days Online.

This is a chance for MVPs to talk about some of the cool new MS tech that’s out there, show you how to use it yourself, and give a few case studies. This year it’s all about AI, Bots, Data Science, and Azure OSS – awesome stuff!

Since I’m not able to attend this on the day of the event, my fellow Bot MVP, Gary Pretty, will be accompanied by the talented James Mann (no doubt a Bot MVP in the next round of awards!) for a couple of sessions on Day 1 all about BotFramework, LUIS, and the various features and tooling around that ecosystem.

So that you don’t miss out on my handsome visage (!), I’m pre-recording a short session at Microsoft over the next couple of weeks, which will hopefully be played here and there throughout the conference, where I give a very brief case study for the JustEat Help chatbot; it’ll be a tasty Bot infomercial snack – don’t miss out!

Full Schedule

20 February 2017

  • 10.00am: Data, data, data – How and where to store it on Azure?
  • 11.00pm: Conversational UI using the Microsoft BOT Framework
  • 12.00pm: Microsoft Bot Framework and Cognitive Services: Make your BOT smarter!
  • 1.00pm: The best kept secret, Document DB.
  • 2.00pm: Let’s discuss Server-less.
  • 3.00pm: Keynote: Dr Mike Rys What is an Azure Data Lake?

21 February 2017

  • 10.00am: Creating a PHP-MySQL web app in Azure App Service and deploying using FTP.
  • 11.00am: Gain profit from Azure app service tooling as an OSS developer.
  • 12.00pm: Dockerizing Your Cross-Plat .NET Development.
  • 1.00pm: Communication Driven Development.
  • 2.00pm: Monitoring Linux in Azure with Microsoft Operations Management Suite Log Analytics.
  • 3.00pm: The Open Source World of Xamarin.

22 February 2017

  • 10.00am: Bootstrapping blockchain.
  • 11.00am: How IOT and data is changing lives.
  • 12.00pm: An introduction to Quantum Computing.
  • 1.00pm: Social Scientist Professor Bradley Love from University College London and the Alan Turing Institute
  • 2.00pm: Microsoft Regional Directors panel.

If this whets your appetite for nerd knowledge, pre register now at https://aka.ms/uktechdays2017