Developing a chatbot with language understanding capabilities is a huge leap from basic pattern recognition on the input to match to specific commands.

If you have a botframework chatbot, you’re currently limited to using LUIS as your NLP (Natural Language Processing) provider via the various Luis classes: LuisDialog, LuisModelAttribute, and LuisService.

If you’re trying to compare alternative NLP services, such as kitt.ai or wit.ai or even Alexa, then implementing support for another NLP service in Botframework for this can be a bit tricky.

In this article I’ll show you one approach to decoupling your botframework bot from a specific NLP solution.

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Creating a hosted bot using Microsoft’s botframework couldn’t be easier; hopefully you’ve had a chance to create one already, and if not there’s a great introduction to creating your first bot right here.

In the previous article we saw how to create a QnA (aka FAQ/Knowledge Base) service using a little known QnA Maker service of the botframework.

In this post we’ll start to create a more intelligent bot; one which can appear to understand the intent of the incoming message and extract specific key variables from it.

Understanding the intent of a piece of text is a really tricky problem to solve; totally out of scope for this article, and for most bot projects! Luckily, the botframework has a friend called LUIS – the Language Understanding Intelligence Service.

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