A bot is a piece of software designed to automate a specific task. When talked about in the context of conversation as a platform, a bot becomes the chat interface of a regular app. So, you should allow tasks that require full UI to be performed by the user only through conversation. We are at the early stages of a major evolving technology trend: the rise of conversation bots. Conversation bots can read and write messages just like a human would. Users will be able to interact with bots just as they interact with other humans using natural language.

Skype, WeChat, Kik, Facebook, GroupMe, Slack, Telegram, and so on are emerging conversation platforms, which help us in enabling interactions with any service from within the conversation platform. All these platforms enable developers to build conversation bots to provide a specific service. We can program bots to carry out specific automated actions...

Let's look at some of the use cases where bots can enable users to have natural conversation to meet their needs:

• We can develop some e-commerce bots that enable us to buy goods and services through Skype, Slack, Facebook, and any other conversation platforms
• We can develop bots for restaurants to order food online or to make reservations at a restaurant
• We can develop content bots that share relevant content with you (such as news and weather)
• We can develop watcher/tracker bots that can notify us when specific events happen (such as when a flight is delayed, when your car needs servicing, and when your pizza order is ready for pickup)
• We can develop banking and stock trading bots that can provide financial services
• We can develop workflow bots that can automate business workflows in marketing, sales, operations, HR/admin, finance, payroll, and others
• When it comes to the IoT domain, bots are...

The Microsoft Bot Framework allows developers to develop code once and, using the Microsoft Bot Connector, deploy it onto multiple channels, including SMS, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Skype, GroupMe, and many other channels:

The Microsoft Bot Framework has three main components:

• Bot Connector: This allows you to easily connect your bot to Slack or Skype, via SMS or the web
• Bot Builder SDK: An SDK that allows you to develop bots using C# .NET or Node.js, which is open source
• Bot Directory: A collection of all approved bots connected through the Bot Connector; it is a marketplace where users can search for bots to add in their chat applications

To develop a bot, perform the following steps:

1. Build a bot using the C# SDK.
2. Test it using the Bot Framework emulator.

Let's go through the steps to create a bot application using the Bot Framework Connector SDK .NET template. They are as follows:

1. Open Visual Studio and navigate to File | New | Project... and select Visual C# from the left side Templates category. Then, from the Templates section, you will see the Bot Application template:

2. Select the Bot Application template, name the project Hello World, and then click on OK:

A solution gets created with the Hello World project...

The Post method accepts messages from the user as an activity, which contains all conversation information between the user and our bot. Using this, we can ascertain what kind of information the user wants from the bot:

public async Task<HttpResponseMessage> Post([FromBody]Activity activity) 

Here, we defined a sample bot that will reply back to the user with the same as what you say to it.

The Bot Framework provides many features that include how to identify the type of incoming message and based on that, your bot can respond to the user. To identify that, we have activity enum types, which will provide information about the conversation.

To identify and apply business logic to the message sent by the user, we will write the following code in the Post method:

if (activity.Type == ActivityTypes.Message) 
            { 
} 

If the user is sending a message, it means they are requesting something...

To test and debug the bot application locally, we have the Bot Framework emulator, which will provide all the rich functionalities of the Bot Framework SDK.

Download the emulator and install it from https://emulator.botframework.com/. Now, go to Visual Studio and press F5 to run and deploy the Hello World bot application locally in your browser. You will see the welcome page Default.htm of your bot as shown here:

Now, open the bot emulator that you installed in the first step. By default, the emulator sets the bot URL to localhost. Make sure that the bot application localhost port and the URL port in the emulator are the same. To check that, go to the browser where your bot application is running and open, and check the port number after the localhost word in that URL:

Now, we will see how to use dialogs for the same Hello World bot application.

Dialogs will be used in a conversational process, where there is an interaction or exchange of messages between the user and the bot. Each dialog is an abstraction that encapsulates its own state in a C# class that implements IDialog. To work with dialogs, we need to import the Microsoft.Bot.Builder.Dialogs namespace. Add a C# class HelloWorldDialog into your project. To add a class, right-click on your project and navigate to Add | Class... from the menu:

Give the Name as HelloWorldDialog:

In order to change the Hello World example, add the following code in HelloWorldDialog. To use the Bot Builder, we first need to import the required namespace:

using Microsoft.Bot...

The main purpose of FormFlow is to provide more simplified, guided conversations. This gives more flexibility and avoids ambiguity in the conversation. It has helped to review the progress so far. It has limitations compared to dialogs, but in a way that requires less effort. With the combination of dialogs and LUIS dialogs, we can get the best of both worlds.

Dialogs can be are very powerful and flexible, but it can take lot of efforts in handling a guided conversation, like ordering a pizza. At any point in dialog one can contemplate various possibilities of what's next. You may be required to provide the clarification about an ambiguity, help options, go back, or display the progress.

In order to ease out the process of building the guided conversations, the framework comes with the powerful dialog building block known as FormFlow. Some of the flexibilities provided...

In this chapter, we discussed how to build a bot by locally deploying a simple Hello World bot application. You also learned about Visual Studio, C# .NET, the Bot Framework, and the related technologies along with all the steps for creating projects. We also discussed the bot emulator and how it relates to bot development. In the next chapter, we will see how to develop a fully functional weather bot. Also, we will learn about how the bot communicates about the current weather in a given city. You will learn how the bot interacts with Skype or any other channel to know the current weather.