Category Archives: Bot

London Bot Framework Meetup Numero Four

On the 16th January I had the pleasure of hosting another London BotFramework meetup at the newly constructed event space in the Just Eat offices.

London BotFramework Meetup #4

They’ve joined three floors with a staircase, so attendees can have beers and pizza upstairs while the presenters sweat with the AV equipment downstairs!

There was a great turnout for this one, including the usual gang and a few new faces too.

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Video

Just want to get stuck in? Here’s the video; first half is Jimmy, second half is Jessica.

Sessions

For this meetup we were fortunate enough to have the Engström MVP power team, Jessica and Jimmy, who were in town for NDC London and graced us with their presence.

1) Developing Cross Platform Bots: Jimmy Engström

Jimmy Engstrom - Cross Platform Bots
The first session included several fantastic live demos where Jimmy creates a simple chat bot and, with minimal development effort, gets it working on Alexa, Cortana, and Google Home!

(Rendering my own ingenious Alexa BotFramework hack from last year quite useless!)

During the day Jimmy Engström is a .NET developer and he does all the fun stuff during his spare time. He and his wife run a code intensive user group (Coding After Work) that focuses on helping participants with code and design problems, and a podcast with the same name. Jimmy can be found tweeting as @apeoholic

2) Conversational UX: Jessica Engström

Jessica Engstrom - Conversational UX
In the second half Jessica gave a great overview of creating a framework to ensure your bot – speech or text based – seems less, well, robotic!

Some great takeaways from this which can easily be applied to your next project.

Being a geek shows in all parts of Jessica Engström’s life, whether it be organizing hackathons, running a user group and a podcast with her husband, game nights (retro or VR/MR) with friends, just catching the latest superhero movie or speaking internationally at conferences.

Her favorite topics is UX/UI and Mixed reality and other futuristic tech. She’s a Windows Development MVP. Together with her husband she runs a company called “AZM dev” which is focused on HoloLens and Windows development.

Follow her exploits over on twitter as @grytlappen

Summary

The updated event space at Just Eat is great and gives better visibility of the sessions thanks to stadium seating at the back.

The sessions were insightful and overall I think this went well.

Here’s to the next one and don’t forget to join up (and actually attend when you RSVP… ahem…)

London Bot Framework Meetup the Third

Welcome to the Third London BotFramework Meetup! Here's the line up

On Wednesday 22nd November 2017 I had the pleasure of running the third London Bot Framework meetup at the lovely Just Eat office in central London. The offices have been recently upgraded and the new meetup space has a huge 9 screen display a multiple mic speaker system, including a fantastic CatchBox throwable mic for ensuring everyone hears the audience questions

It has been a year since the previous one (whoops) but it was great to see some familiar faces return in the attendees. I had forgotten how much fun it is to emcee an event like this! Maybe next time I’ll be sure to just emcee and not also commit presenting a session too.

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Building your first Botframework based Cortana Skill

Hi. I'm Cortana.

At //BUILD 2017 Microsoft announced support for Cortana Skills and connecting a Cortana Skill into a Bot Framework chatbot; given the number of chatbots out there using Microsoft Bot Framework, this is an extremely exciting move.

In this article I’ll show you how to create your first Cortana Skill from a Bot Framework chatbot and make it talk!

Cortana

If you’re not already familiar with Cortana, this is Microsoft’s “personal assistant” and is available on Windows 10 (version 1607 and above) and a couple of Windows phones (Lumia 950/950 XL), a standalone speaker – like an Amazon Echo – and a plethora of devices that can run the Cortana app, including iOS and Android and plenty of laptops.

Cortana all the things, Derrick.

You’re going to be seeing a lot more of this little box of tricks (“Bot” of tricks? Box of bots?.. hmm…), so you might as well get in on the act right now!

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Receiving Images to Your Skype Botframework Bot (v2!)

If you’re getting a “403” HTTP error when attempting to receive an image sent to your Skype bot, and the previous use of message.ServiceUrl to create a ConnectorClient didn’t work, try this more verbose version which explicitly sets the authorization header:

byte[] data;

if (image.ContentUrl != null)
{
    using (var connectorClient 
        = new ConnectorClient(new Uri(message.ServiceUrl)))
    {
        var token = 
            await (connectorClient.Credentials as MicrosoftAppCredentials)
                .GetTokenAsync();

        var uri = new Uri(image.ContentUrl);

        using (var httpClient = new HttpClient())
        {
            if (uri.Host.EndsWith("skype.com") 
                && uri.Scheme == Uri.UriSchemeHttps)
            {
                httpClient
                    .DefaultRequestHeaders
                    .Authorization = 
                        new AuthenticationHeaderValue("Bearer", token);

                httpClient
                    .DefaultRequestHeaders
                    .Accept
                    .Add(new MediaTypeWithQualityHeaderValue("application/octet-stream"));
            }

            // Get the image in a byte[] variable
            data = await httpClient.GetByteArrayAsync(uri);
        }
    }
}

Generating Image Hashtags using Microsoft’s Computer Vision API

Whatever your social media tool of choice is these days, it’s almost guaranteed to be filled with images and their associated hashtags #sorrynotsorry #lovelife #sunnyday

Sometimes coming up with those tags is more work than perfectly framing your latest #flatlay shot.

In the age of amazing image recognition tech, it must be possible to create something that can help us out and give us more time to move that light source around to cast the right shadow over your meal.

Turns out, it is possible! Yay! (of course..)

In this article I’ll show you how to automatically generate image hashtags via a chatbot using Microsoft’s Computer Vision API.

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Sentiment Analysis using Microsoft’s Cognitive Services

Now that we are making more conversational interfaces thanks to technology like botframework, interaction with the user is no longer limited to a tap on a link or a button.

Having written language as the primary form of interaction with our systems gives significant difficulties in terms of intent understanding, but also gives great opportunities for further understanding of the user.

Intent understanding has already been tackled by the likes of LUIS; what about the user’s sentiment?

In this article I’m going to introduce Microsoft’s Text Analysis API and show you how to easily get sentiment analysis for a message coming in to your bot.

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MVP led TechDays Online: Videos!

As part of Microsoft’s recent Tech Days Online, I was very pleased to be able to record a couple of short videos about botframework, LUIS, the QnA Maker, and how I have been working with JustEat to use these technologies in their Customer Help chatbot solution.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend the live TechDays sessions, so instead of an hour or two of my dulcet tones you only have the pleasure of ten minutes; feel free to replay those minutes as many times as you like!

First up, a ten minute session on the JustEat Customer Care chatbot implementation:

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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