What is Bot ?

Have you experienced when you call a bank and automated voice welcomes you on the other side ? The voice guides you through your course of actions and optionally takes input. Most likely you end up updating your house address or check on how much balance in your account ?

Or you just visit a car dealership website where you will see pop with text “How can i help you today?” and during chat you realise it doesn’t look a human on the other side !

Well you get it right. It’s was a Bot all along.  In terms of our online experience Bots are becoming everyday thing to deal with and we need to talk about this more !

Benefits of Bot

  • They are very useful doing expected and repeated tasks like taking food order.
  • You don’t need human resource 24/7 when Bot can be reached anytime. 
  • While human resource can handle certain number of requests, Bot can handle much more than that.

Challenges with Bot

  • Human to Bot interaction can be very challenging since it’s not always easy for Bot to pick up natural language and user context.
  • If not well designed it can lead up to bad user experience and instead harm your business prospects. 

Microsoft Azure Bot Service

AI and machine learning are not the book words any more. Microsoft wants to make it easy for anyone to leverage AI and machine learning for their business and daily use. Azure Bot service offers a cloud based Bot service solution and is the key service in Microsoft AI space. You can design, build and deploy your Bot service very quickly. You don’t need to be a geek to actually do this all. Here are some key benefits of using Microsoft Azure Bot Service

  • Easy to build and scale.
  • You can integrate your Bot with traditional services like Skype, Facebook easily. 
  • You can actually train your Bot to understand natural language (pick up different contexts) so with time it gets smart using LUIS . 
  • You can integrate the Bot with other Microsoft cognitive services like speech, search, vision and much more to offer best user experience based on your business needs. 

Think about an office reception where Bot interacts with you, takes your details and picture, sign you up and offer a drink to you through vending machine while you sit in the waiting area? Good news ! this is all possible using Microsoft cognitive services.

In my up coming articles, I will talk about

  • Creating a simple Bot and how to make it smart by applying machine learning. 
  • We will learn how can we install and configure the Bot emulator to test your live Bot service end points.
  • Integrating Cognitive services with Bot. 

Stay Tuned !

 

Resources

https://www.luis.ai/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/bot-service/

 

Like the post ? Share !