Microsoft Teams Voice Integration and Media Forking / CTI Events - microsoft-teams

I've invested time today, researching voice integration with Microsoft Teams, with the following requirements.
CTI type events when a user answers a call and hangs-up a call. Not much here, the webhook functionality, detailed here under webhooks and connectors, does not seem to apply to voice from what I can gather (it refers to channels) but it does potentially offer the mechanics I am looking for (where I get proactive notification of event changes), "allow users to subscribe to receive notifications and messages from your web services". Any suggestions on how to subscribe to specific Team Users voice events or alternate approaches? Also found the below documentation but still doesn't see to cover the specific call events?
Use the Microsoft Graph API to get change notifications
Is here a way to fork the media of a Teams call to another destination, to say allow further intelligent processing of the on-going conversation for real time analytics?
Thanks!

We don't have any event/subscription to specific Team Users voice events.
Please refer below documentation for supported list:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/subscription-post-subscriptions? view=graph-rest-1.0&tabs=http
You can raise a feedback request here: https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/forum/ad198462-1c1c-ec11-b6e7-0022481f8472
As an alternative, we have "Azure Communication Services - Voice and video calling events" that you can utilize as per your need.
Reference doc: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/event-grid/communication-services-voice-video-events

Related

How to disable "desktop_notification" messages when using RTM

With RTM connected, when I try to use my account to talk to a bot created by myself with DM, each time I got 3 messages:
"user_typing", "message", "desktop_notification"
Can I suppress "desktop_notification" by applying some settings to my bot?
For me, it seems "message" is good to go.
The Slack Real Time Messaging (RTM) API does have the concept of subscribing to specific events, so the answer to your question is no.
As Erik suggests in his comment, you are best off just ignoring these events in your script -- ideally as early in your logic as possible.
One other thing to note is that with the Event API you can subscribe to specific events. There are pros and cons to both the Event/Web APIs and RTM APIs so I mention this out of completeness. The Event API is not a 1:1 supplement for the RTM API in your case from what I can tell for your use case (for example, you'd need to use the Web API for sending a message and Event API for receiving events -- as opposed to just the RTM API as you have now).

Chatbot handoff from Messenger to Zendesk

I am developing a customer service chatbot, using Azure's Bot Framework in .NET, using the the Messenger channel. I wanted to know if anyone knows what the best way to handle the handoff to a human on Zendesk (which my platform already uses as its CRM platform). I'm not looking for when to do the handoff, but how to manage what happens next.
What I would love to be able to do would be that so when handoff is needed, a ticket on Zendesk would be created, sending for example a file (the transcript of the conversation so far). Then the agent would be able to solve the customer's problem in that ticket, having a conversation with him, having the bot sending messages back and forth between zendesk and messenger.
I don't know if this has been done before, or if it's at all possible. And I'm free to other solutions to the problem of handling this kind of handoff, without having to create a separate "chat" for the customer service agents to use, like it's explained on the azure documentation.
Thank you for your patience while I researched this. I found this resource that I believe will meet your needs. This functionality is built off of the Bot Framework utilizing .NET (it's also available for Nodejs). There are two available methods to connect a client to an agent.
The first (which should apply to you) aggregates different channels into one allowing an agent to pickup in the same channel where the bot handed off. The second opens a new channel when an agent joins the conversation.
Intermediator Bot
I was able to spin up a bot using this and confirmed the bot was listening for outside traffic.
Hope this helps.
Steve.
One thing that I'm about to try is this:
Bot conversation ends.
Bot service calls an Azure Function, passing the conversation content.
The Azure Function integrates with Trello API, creating an entry on a Kanban board.
So, instead of Trello as I want to do, you can make a call to the Zendesk API.
I'm writing a few articles about developing Azure bots. The next two actually are dealing with these very things. You can find out more here. sign up if you'd like to get notified over the next week or so when the new tutorials are online.
Hope that helps!
Tim

Integrating Microsoft teams into my windows application

I have a desktop app to which I want to integrate Microsoft Teams.
Does Teams provides an API for the integration.I read few articles but they all explained how to create apps in Teams and use of Microsoft Graph API to get information about Teams/channel etc.
Could someone help me with this, if they had any solution.
few of my finding on the internet:
https://blog.thoughtstuff.co.uk/2017/04/microsoft-actively-working-on-a-teams-api/
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/graph-explorer#
https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/16972258-developer-api-to-read-create-teams-and-channels-in?page=2&per_page=20
There are two distinct ways of accomplishing this:
Using the Microsoft Graph API to create/read/write information. Currently the only thing we support is the ability to add a team to an existing Office 365 Group, the ability to create and read channels within a Team, and to post a message to a team/channel. We are adding more APIs, including the ability to read messages from a channel, but it's not available yet (and we don't have a public ETA). The ability to read and write channel messages from a channel should allow you do what you want.
Controls that you can embed in an application that read/write the data for you. That's a common developer request and we will deliver that eventually, but it's further out.

Compare Microsoft Bot Framework With Howdy Botkit

I am looking to create a bot and have come across Microsoft Bot Framework (with LUIS or can use C# SDK provided by API.AI) and Howdy.ai Botkit (with Middleware support for LUIS & API.AI).
Can someone help me with comparison between these two?
I am looking for following things in my bot -
Support multiple channels including Email.
Have the bot act in both reactive (reply to some user message) and proactive (send out message to users once a day about something important to them or followups)
manners.
Save and later retrieve user provided data (manage state).
Rich message support.
Respond with delay.
Manage conversation history.
Are there things that are available in one but not in another?
I tried developing a bot in Botkit and MS Bot framework both. Ultimately I went with MS bot framework. Some of my reasons which could help with the comparison:
MSBotFramework has support for skype, slack, telegram, Facebook, and many other channels. BotKit, the last I checked, supported only Facebook and slack. I was targeting skype and telegram and that was a deal breaker.
Botkit currently is node.js only. On the other hand, MSBotFramework has .Net, Node.js and even a REST API (which basically means you can use it from any language you want). Also, there are python wrappers available which internally make use of the REST API.
Being a Microsoft product, MSBotFramework's integration with skype, azure, azure analytics, LUIS and other Microsoft services is very easy. This could be required for developing, deploying or integrating natural language support. Botkit supports LUIS integration, which is fairly easy( maybe as easy as MSBotFramework). The analytics (through botkit studio) (was) very basic and MSBotFramework wins hands down here.
I found the documentation for MSBotFramework more comprehensive than Botkit but both of them have an equal amount of resources and documentation.
Some of the other points you have asked about:
Proactive messages depend on the channel you are developing for. For eg. Facebook allows a time window of 24 hours from the user's last message in which you can reply. Whereas other platforms like skype and telegram allow you to send a message anytime you want.
State management will need to be handled on your end. Bot Framework provides some mechanism, but it is not robust enough to be used in production.msdoc
Rich messages are platform dependent, but bot framework does pretty well in catering to most of them. So, the way this works is, you send back the message to bot framework in its own rich message format. It converts to platform specific format. If you have only one or 2 platforms in mind, you can develop accordingly.
Respond with delay - You will have to implement it yourself, though bot framework has lots of examples of doing this.github
Managing conversation can be done easily if you are using C# and .Net platform in general. The documentation and number of examples are very impressive.github repo for samples
All in all, I would recommend MS bot framework.

Twilio, Tropo - who else for SMS and Voice apps?

I've found Twilio and Tropo so far as services to aid SMS and Voice apps.
Are there others?
I am interested mostly in real-time speech recognition (i.e. the user can speak things and the system can respond based on that).
Also, if anyone knows what the speech recognition quality is like, it'd help!
For reliable SMS delivery we tested Tropo and Twilio and Twilio won hands down... Better API imo (including callbacks that make things like knowing how long a call lasted trivially easy), they manage the sending rate so you don't have to (Tropo discards SMS messages if you send too fast).
On the other hand, Tropo has speech recognition that works very well (although not as well on real-world cell calls in less than silent environments) and has integrated Twitter support.
Both offer excellent support. Tropo is free for development, but Twilio is so inexpensive that's probably a non issue.
My more detailed writeup is at http://pardner.com/2011/04/tropo-not-ready-for-prime-time-went-with-twilio/
(Since the blog was written I've learned Tropo fixed Twitter support, so that's actually a very cool feature in favor of Tropo. Turns out you can mix n match, our app uses BOTH.)
For speech recognition and an API-based telephony service, Tropo's about the only option. If you drop the speech reco requirement CloudVox (hosted asterisk apps) could be a possibility. Or you could install Asterisk yourself and use something like Adhearsion to develop your apps.
If you want to expand your scope beyond cloud telephony APIs, then you could take a look at VoiceXML, a W3C standard for building telephony apps. VoiceXML hosts generally support speech recognition. A search for "VoiceXML Hosting" will turn up several thousand options.
In the interest of disclosure, I'm one of the guys behind Tropo and we're a product from Voxeo, the largest VoiceXML host.
I am reevaluating vendors that provide Voice, SMS, and Email broadcast services. It seems that most of the more reputable names out there (Twilio, Plivo, TelAPI) only offer SMS and Voice capabilities, not Email. SimplyCast is one of the few vendors that seem to provide all three.
Any recommendations on vendors that provide Email/Voice/SMS and the following capabilities through an API?
Submitting and reporting on broadcasts
Create Email broadcasts with attachments
Email templates for customized messages
Submit voice recordings (mp3 preferred) for voice broadcasts
SMS broadcast creation
Reliable uptime and support

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