Enhanced Direct Line Authentication Features

This blog covers the new enhanced authentication features available for the Direct Line channel. For implementation examples of the concepts discussed here, please see this blog post. Azure Bot Service authentication The features discussed here are built on top of Azure Bot Service authentication. Azure Bot Service authentication enables you to authenticate users to and get access tokens from a….

Using WebChat with Azure Bot Service’s Authentication

[Updated on 5/31/2019] This blog covers how to use Web Chat with the Azure Bot Service’s built-in authentication capability to authenticate chat users with various identity providers such AAD, GitHub, Facebook, etc, including best practices on how to ensure a secure experience. This tutorial also covers where the built-in authentication features are currently supported and where they are not. Step 1: Registering Connections and….

Sign-In experiences

This blog post discusses the options for creating various sign-on experiences when using WebChat. Sign-on experiences enable the bot to identify the users who are part of a conversation and to perform actions on users’ behalf against identity providers. For example, a bot can ask a user to sign-in to Office 365 so that the bot can check the user’s….

Testing authentication to your bot using the Bot Framework Emulator

In this blog post, we’ll show you how to test bot authentication capabilities from Azure Bot Service using the Bot Framework Emulator. You’ll learn what is required to set up in the Emulator to use OAuthCards as well as various options for interacting with OAuthCards. When the bot sends an OAuthCard to the user, the user will have an opportunity….

How to properly send a greeting message and common issues from customers

A very common chat/conversational feature that bot developers need to implement, is how to create an initial welcome or greeting message when a user initially begins interacting with the bot (say, the first time they open web chat). One issue some customers have been having lately, is that when using trying the conversationUpdate, is that their bot behaves as expected….

Find Your Azure Bot’s AppID and AppSecret

Today we have a short update to answer one question which is sometimes asked by our users – Where can I find my Bot’s AppID and Password? Prior to general availability, the only way to create and register a bot with the Bot Framework was through the developer portal. When you created a bot, a new password was generated in a….

Locally develop and manage LUIS applications with new BotBuilder tools

In our last article we introduced some of the helpful new tools from the Bot Builder tools suite. To recap, first we demonstrated how to create question/answer pairs using a new special markdown file format (.lu). Then, we used the new LUDown tool to parse the file to create a knowledge base (.json), and used the QnAMaker API tool to create….

Create a QnA Knowledge Base using new BotBuilder Tools

This year at Build 2018, we announced the general availability of QnAMaker as well as the new Bot Builder tools preview. One exciting new tool called LUDown allows you to easily create natural language components locally for both LUIS and QnAMaker. In this article, we’ll be providing an overview of  how to use LUDown to create a QnA Maker knowledge base (KB), and….

Improving accuracy in LUIS with patterns

Since LUIS became generally available last year several new features have been added to make it easier to create and train robust natural language models for your applications. If you’ve used LUIS in the past, hopefully you’re pretty familiar with intents and entities, and how to train your model to use them by using utterances. In this post, we’ll go over….

Security changes coming to Azure Web Apps, affecting Azure Bot Service

Beginning tomorrow,  from May 15th to May 30th 2018 (03/15/2018 – 05/30/2018), Azure Web Apps will be rolling out stricter protocol enforcement world-wide. This will impact clients that are using TLS 1.0 without an SNI header. The only resolution is to upgrade the clients to use TLS 1.2 (preferable), TLS 1.1, or TLS 1.0 with an SNI header. Overview Azure Web….