QnA maker revisited, with Suggested Actions and App Insights

In this post we’ll go over a few different strategies to manage user feedback for your bots. Instead of starting from the beginning with a new bot project, we’ll be continuing off of the demo QnA bot we created in a previous post – QnA Maker with rich cards in .NET. The demo we started from that post is not….

Bot Framework at Microsoft Ignite 2017

This year at Ignite 2017, Microsoft is hosting many different sessions from the Bot Framework, with a range of topics geared towards beginner – advanced bot developers. In these sessions we’ll share with you what we’ve learned about bot design and practices, how our customers have been using the Bot Framework to meet their business needs, and the different ways….

Natural Language Understanding Services – a comparison

At this years’ SIGdial conference, researchers from the Technical University of Munich, department of informatics published the following paper – Evaluating Natural Language Understanding Services for Conversational Question Answering Systems Currently, there is no established way to evaluate different NLU (Natural Language Understanding) services. One of the primary goals of the research team was to define a way to compare these….

Azure Bot Service now supports Azure Web Apps

Today we’re happy to announce the addition of Azure Web Apps to the Azure Bot Service, one of the most requested features of the past few months. You can find the Azure Web Apps option in the new “Hosting Plan” drop down, when you create a new bot using the Azure Bot Service in the Azure Portal. In particular: “App Service….

HTML is not supported in Web Chat

Client side HTML rendering is not rendered for official Web Chat channels. Web Chat is intended to support markdown, and while markdown itself can support in-line HTML, this was not an intended feature for the Web Chat in the Bot Framework. Markdown in-line HTML Why isn’t HTML  supported? The primary reason behind this decision was to ensure a consistency of….

New Channel Inspector Features

Update 3/4/2019: Channel Inspector has been retired. To understand what events (Activities on the wire) can come from which channels, refer to this article. ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————– Earlier this year in February, we first announced the Bot Framework Channel Inspector. Since then, we’ve been upgrading this preview tool to support new feature releases as the Bot Framework evolves. The Channel Inspector now includes support for….