I'm currently evaluating Azure Bot Service using Azure Function as a Slack bot.
It works fine with direct and group messages, but I'm having troubles to make it work with app_mention events, the azure function is not getting fired at all.
Also, i'd like to experiment with slash commands, which are also a feature available to slack app.
Reading the docs, I understand have to write my own middleware to parse these messages, but it's not clear to me how can I do it with Functions.
Is it possible? Or will I need to host a separate webapp?
Turned out that Azure Bot Service is currently supporting a subset of Slack events out-of-the-box; this was not clearly stated in the documentation.
We ended up with a first prototype based on Bot Service integrated with the basic Slack events, will evaluate it and then proceed with a full bot-framework WebApp if needed.
Related
I have a Text2SQL model (EditSQL: https://github.com/ryanzhumich/editsql) which I have configured to take a sentence as input and return a SQL query as output.
Now, I want to deploy this program as a chat bot application in Microsoft Teams.
I understand there's Microsoft bot framework that enables publishing a bot and the 3 options are described here.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/choose-bot-building-tool/
However, I am not finding any of them suitable for my use case since I need to deploy a Question-Answering Bot where the Questions from users need to be sent to an external server like AWS and the response from AWS (could be an excel file) needs to be sent back to the user. Multiple questions can be the part of a conversation, so the chat client should be able to mark start and end of a conversation.
My problem:
What are the basic steps of exposing a ml model via a server so that it can be queried in production.
What are the tools that will allow me to make a client on Teams and a server for this model on AWS?
Please let me know if I should add more information on this.
Thanks
As you've seen, there are a bunch of tools/approaches to creating bots in the Microsoft world, for Teams or otherwise. Underneath, these all use the Bot Framework, but you can develop directly (i.e. write code), or use a higher-level tool like Bot Framework Composer - the choice is yours depending on your own internal skills. If you want to work with code directly, here are a bunch of bot samples, in multiple languages: https://github.com/microsoft/BotBuilder-Samples/tree/main/samples . For isntance, here is an example of integrating the Microsoft QnAMaker service into your bot: https://github.com/microsoft/BotBuilder-Samples/tree/main/samples/python/49.qnamaker-all-features
Basically, if you go the development approach, your bot is just a web service. Once it receives the message, it can call out to any other service behind the scenes. That means it can receive a message, call out to an AWS service, receive the response, and send a reply to the user.
For multiple questions as part of a 'set' of chats, Bot Framework provides an idea called "dialogs" that should work for you.
I don't understand the difference here, but there must be one. With the Azure QnA Maker, I can create a list of questions and interact with the Knowledge Base via an API and get answers back. What additional features does the Bot Service offer?
QnA service can only retrieve answers from the Knowledgebase, nothing else. You can think it as a fancier Database, you can query it using human language.
Bot Service is the application layer, you can build other business logic in this layer to make your Bot looks smarter. e.g. User asks "What's the weather tomorrow", when your bot service receives this message, you can call the weather API to get the weather, instead of forwarding the question to the QnA service. The bot service also provides interfaces to integrate with different chat channels like Teams, Slack, etc.
Of course, you can do much more in the bot service based on your own business needs. If your bot is solely used for QnA, this layer indeed will seem to be a thin layer wrapper.
The Azure Bot service is just a bot managing SaaS which offers multiple things like ability to automatically push you bot onto multiple channels(teams, slack, facebook etc.) without needing to code the adaptors. It also offers other services like hosting your bot onto the Azure cloud servers and other services like LUIS (Microsoft's NLU), QnA maker, speech service etc.
The web channels adaptor is mostly free which the bot hosting and other services are paid
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
We have created a bot which uses Luis to address user queries. Would like to understand how can we perform a performance testing to my bot which can be like a VSTS testing. Yes tried with VSTS also but of no use, since my bot api is always sending a request and response couldn't capture the exact one. Please help.
I'm not sure if you are using Azure bot service directly or the other way. Considering if you are using the Azure Bot Service following are the steps to configure performance test.
You can do performance test using Azure Bot Service from continuous integration tab
Select the team services account, subscription and location.
You can track the build and errors using Azure App insights
Let me know if you are looking for anything else.
Regards
-Jyo
I'm looking at using the Bot Framework (https://docs.botframework.com) is it possible to register a bot programmatically e.g via service? I see there are Azure bots but still don't see a way to register via service?
At the moment you have to manually log into the portal to register the bot and obtain your keys. There has not been any indication from Microsoft that this will change in future.
from what I know about the goals of the dev team, since this is a highly requested feature, we will probably see this in action in future version of the bot framework.
But no kind of timeline yet for this feature.