I am trying to develop a custom chatbot to replace the interface of a CLI tool. The tool "prompts" the user for input with built-in validation for type and value. This prompting is done asynchronously at various points during the execution.
The CLI tool is built with TypeScript so I'm using the same SDK for compatibility.
When prompting, the tool provides a list of questions (name, type, choice options, default, validation function) which I have been able to integrate with using the WaterfallDialog although this only works via integration tests but not in the complete bot context where it only asks the first question in the list then resumes the parent dialog.
I am new to building ChatBots and would appreciate some guidance on how this can be done.
Thanks in advance.
Proactive Messaging might be the answer. Proactive messages can be sent by the bot to users who have previously messaged the bot. The sample's default implementation messages all users, so you would need to also implement user auth and identify users to message them individually.
Related
Is there a possibility to send a user message to specified user(s) in MS Teams?
Elaboration:
My current flow triggers a message to a user, but it is always sent via FlowBot and appears in the Power Automate chat of MS Teams.
Flow: (Outlook; Trigger) "When a new email arrives (V3)" → (MS Teams) "Post message in chat or channel" → (Outlook) "Mark as read or unread" (v3)
Can individual users be set as recipients of direct messages with the message sent in the already existing chat with the user?
If yes, is it possible without a value chain?
Thanks!
As I see it, there are kind of a few different questions in your post, so I'll try deal with each of them:
In order to send a message directly to a user, the user has to come "from" someone/something, and in Teams that basically means a Bot. The easiest way, therefore, to do this is to use the out-of-box FlowBot. If that's fine for you, you're good to go. If you want it to come from another Bot (i.e. one you own) then you need to create a Bot somehow. Two main options are:
Code it from scratch using Microsoft Bot Framework - code in a regular language (C#, Python, etc.) or using Bot Framework Composer
Use Power Virtual Agents - ala "Power" family, it's kind of a "Drag and Drop" bot capability. You don't need to actually have the bot DO anything though, if you don't want it to handle user responses (you can do most of that visually in your Power Automate flow. For this option, you'll be able to select the bot from within Power Automate designer as the "send from" bot
You can choose to have the bot send a message directly to the user (i.e. in a 1-1 chat, like what you're seeing with FlowBot) or you can choose to have it send to a particular Channel inside Teams - either is fine. Be aware that Channels have threaded conversations, if you want to use them, but 1-1 chats do not.
You can try these Power Automate steps to create the 1:1 chat between you and the user, then send a message to it.
My organization recently implemented Microsoft Teams and is experiencing issues with users tagging #General unnecessarily, posting in the wrong channel, and posting inappropriate content (not necessarily NSFW but off-topic).
Slack has third-party tools that allow you to set rules for a channel and, if a rule is triggered, the message is automatically deleted. For example, if a user inadvertently tapped their yubikey and sent it to the entire organization, there is a bot that will recognize the key and immediately delete the message. It's effectively the same concept as the AutoMod functionality in Reddit.
I've been looking all over the place but can't seem to find any articles about this type of feature. Does Microsoft Teams allow for any functionality like this?
Currently Teams have functionalities such as sending notification from external app to Teams channel via incoming webhook. And also using proactive message notifications.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/webhooks-and-connectors/how-to/add-incoming-webhook
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/bots/how-to/conversations/send-proactive-messages?tabs=dotnet#get-the-user-id-or-teamchannel-id
I'm building my first Teams app which will have two primary functions:
Proactively send a message to the channel (the bot is installed into) when a specific event occurs on my backend.
Members of the channel reacts to the message via actions.
I finally have a pretty good idea of how to set this up (I think) - but one part I'm missing is that in order to identify the specific app installation as belonging to one of my customers, I need to be able to allow the installing user to supply extra information like e.g. an API-key so that I can associate the specific channel with my specific customer.
Is there any way of doing this with a bot app? I've found examples for creating a configuration page, but they all seem to be associated with tab apps?
I could of cource have the bot ask the user for the information - but maybe there's a "cleaner" way?
Any examples or tutorials would be greatly appreciated as I find it rather hard to get stuff working using Microsoft's own examples etc. :)
Thanks a lot!
When you receive any message from the user, either by typing to your bot, or even installing it into a channel, group chat, or personal context (where you get the conversationUpdate event), you are able to get specific details off of the activity object. If the user sends a message, for instance, then the text property on the activity object will have a value. Incidentally, this is the same activity you will use to get the conversation details you need for the Proactive message.
With regards your question, the activity class also includes a tenantId property, hanging off the conversation property. This is the unique Microsoft 365 Id for the tenant, which would be what I'd suggest to uniquely identify them for your API, or licensing, or similar.
Hey in my team's slack (messaging system for those who don't know) we have an automatic response, so that when anyone says "trump", slackbot automatically responds with "the wall just got ten feet higher". Now I want to make a counter that essentially allows slackbot to state "the wall just got ten feet higher, wall height:(have a updated value according to number of times "trump" has been stated)" So basically I want a way to have a value that updates the wall height but I am lost on how to do that within slackbot. Any help is much appreciated, thanks to all!
The default features provided by Slackbot only allows it to respond to keywords, but not much more. So to provide that additional feature you would need to develop a custom bot.
For your use case I would recommend building a so called internal integration for Slack using the Events API.
Internal integration allows you to add custom functions for your Slack team only (as opposed to a full fledged Slack app, that could also be installed and used for other Slack teams).
The Events API allows you to set up a bot that listens to messages and can react to keywords like "trump".
An alternative approach to the events API would be the outgoing webhook. However this function is now deprecated and should no longer be used. Also it only works with public channels.
To set this up you will need to develop a small webservice (e.g. in PHP) that listens on a webserver for requests from the events API, keeps count of how many times the keyword has been invoked in the past and sends an appropriate message back to your Slack team every time the keyword is used.
I can recommend reading the excellent official Slack API documentation if you want to learn more.
If you are familiar with PHP this can be done easily using the Slackbot Framework. It supports Events API allowing you to listen to messages in channels or direct messages (depending on the permission scopes of your APP). So all the conversations on Slack can be sent to your server and you can search for the specific keyword in every message. Then send back an appropriate message to Slack. In summary, the first step is to create an APP for your slack team at https://api.slack.com/apps?new_app=1. Next step is to install the Slackbot Framework which is explained here. Hope this is helpful.
That can also be done by integrating custom slack bot using Django. You'll have to subscribe events and based on events, Slack will send conversation message to the given url, and based on the event, you can write your logic to increase count and post message back to slack work space.
I am creating a bot using MS Bot framework - NodeJs. The below information needs to be captured for logging (Using the bot.use method i.e. IMiddleware).
Receive:
a. UserId
b. UserInput (text)
c. ConversationId
Send:
1. Name of Intent or dialog name that handled this (that handled the user input text)
2. Bot output text
3. ConversationId
4. UserId
I am unable to get the required detail for the 'send'. Can anyone provide me some suggestions on this.
Thanks.
I believe your main struggle is to log the name of intent or dialog. You won't know it in your send middleware if you haven't captured it during the routing phase. Once the Bot Framework figured out where to send the incoming message, it just invokes that function.
These two articles may help you get what you want. Just recently I played with capturing the conversation's breadcrumbs and also logging a full transcript:
http://www.pveller.com/smarter-conversations-part-3-breadcrumbs/
http://www.pveller.com/smarter-conversations-part-4-transcript/
If you need to build a reliable capture engine, I would suggest that you didn't use the session.privateConversationData like I did and instead built your own storage/log infrastructure to push the events to. Just stream them out with a timestamp and conversationId and reconcile on the other end later. The asynchronous nature of everything the bot framework does internally will be haunting you along the way so that's why. Plus, once you scale out beyond testing on a few users and your bot spans multiple processes, you will be out of the single-threaded event loop.