See how custom chatbots and Azure Bot Service can resolve common business problems. This book takes you through the many possibilities of bot development from a business point of view, using Microsoft bot technology, and demonstrates how to connect, deploy, and manage them. Starting with an introduction to chatbots and their features you will go through the design and implementation of Azure chatbots. This will set the foundation for the rest of the book before you learn how to create and manage messages in chatbots. You’ll then see how to deploy your chatbot in different business scenarios and how to integrate Azure chatbots with different applications such as Facebook and Twitter. To really allow you to demonstrate business value, Introducing Azure Bot Service covers tips on enhancing customer satisfaction and developing insights by analyzing customer behavior. This knowledge will help you understand how artificial intelligence techniques such as chatbots help your organization undergo digital transformation. After reading this book, you will be ready to build chatbots using Microsoft Azure, deploy them in different business scenarios, and measure the benefits of chatbots. What You Will Learn Build time-saving chatbots using Azure Bot Service Engage in proactive customer interaction Integrate chatbots as a key aspect of your business strategy Improve customer satisfaction Ease into digital transformation using Azure chatbots Who This Book Is For Developers who are interested in building chatbots.

Build intelligent and smart conversational interfaces using Microsoft Bot Framework About This Book Develop various real-world intelligent bots from scratch using Microsoft Bot Framework Integrate your bots with most popular conversation platforms such as Skype, Slack, and Facebook Messenger Flaunt your bot building skills in your organization by thoroughly understanding and implementing the bot development concepts such as messages (rich text and pictures), dialogs, and third-party authentication and calling Who This Book Is For This book is for developers who are keen on building powerful services with great and interactive bot interface. Experience with C# is needed. What You Will Learn Set up a development environment and install all the required software to get started programming a bot Publish a bot to Slack, Skype, and the Facebook Messenger platform Develop a fully functional weather bot that communicates the current weather in a given city Help your bot identify the intent of a text with the help of LUIS in order to make decisions Integrate an API into your bot development Build an IVR solution Explore the concept of MicroServices and see how MicroServices can be used in bot development Develop an IoT project, deploy it, and connect it to a bot In Detail Bots help users to use the language as a UI and interact with the applications from any platform. This book teaches you how to develop real-world bots using Microsoft Bot Framework. The book starts with setting up the Microsoft Bot Framework development environment and emulator, and moves on to building the first bot using Connector and Builder SDK. Explore how to register, connect, test, and publish your bot to the Slack, Skype, and Facebook Messenger platforms. Throughout this book, you will build different types of bots from simple to complex, such as a weather bot, a natural speech and intent processing bot, an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) bot for a bank, a facial expression recognition bot, and more from scratch. These bots were designed and developed to teach you concepts such as text detection, implementing LUIS dialogs, Cortana Intelligence Services, third-party authentication, Rich Text format, Bot State Service, and microServices so you can practice working with the standard development tools such as Visual Studio, Bot Emulator, and Azure. Style and approach This step-by-step guide takes a learn-while-doing approach, delivering the practical knowledge and experience you need to design and build real-world Bots. The concepts come to you on an as-needed basis while developing a bot so you increase your programming knowledge and experience at the same time.

See how custom chatbots and Azure Bot Service can resolve common business problems. This book takes you through the many possibilities of bot development from a business point of view, using Microsoft bot technology, and demonstrates how to connect, deploy, and manage them. Starting with an introduction to chatbots and their features you will go through the design and implementation of Azure chatbots. This will set the foundation for the rest of the book before you learn how to create and manage messages in chatbots. You'll then see how to deploy your chatbot in different business scenarios and how to integrate Azure chatbots with different applications such as Facebook and Twitter. To really allow you to demonstrate business value, Introducing Azure Bot Service covers tips on enhancing customer satisfaction and developing insights by analyzing customer behavior. This knowledge will help you understand how artificial intelligence techniques such as chatbots help your organization undergo digital transformation. After reading this book, you will be ready to build chatbots using Microsoft Azure, deploy them in different business scenarios, and measure the benefits of chatbots. What You Will Learn Build time-saving chatbots using Azure Bot Service Engage in proactive customer interaction Integrate chatbots as a key aspect of your business strategy Improve customer satisfaction Ease into digital transformation using Azure chatbots Who This Book Is For Developers who are interested in building chatbots.

This is the only comprehensive, authoritative guide to building Conversational User Interfaces (CUI, a.k.a. bots, chatbots, or chatterbots) with the Microsoft Bot Framework. Reflecting the next radical revolution in human-computer interaction, it will help you leverage advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing to empower new and existing applications with stunningly intuitive conversational interfaces. Long-time Microsoft MVP Joe Mayo begins with high-level explanations of what Microsoft Bot Framework is, what you can do with it, and why it matters so much. Next, he presents the foundational knowledge you need to start creating real bots and CUIs. Step by step, you'll learn how to build message dialogs, manage conversations, interact with framework APIs, and incorporate powerful natural language processing with Microsoft's advanced Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS). Mayo also offers detailed guidance on deploying your customized bots to key platforms such as Slack, Skype, and Facebook Messenger. Throughout, Mayo's practical examples combine code with clear explanations of when and why you would perform each task. From start to finish, Programming the Microsoft Bot Framework is relentlessly practical, helping you translate the advanced "magic" of intelligent bots into real solutions right now.

With so many flesh-and-blood humans needing support, digital assistants can offer a valuable service finding out what users need and improving the basic process of online data gathering. Building Chatbots with Microsoft Bot Framework and Node.js walks readers concept-by-concept through the process of building their own capable chatbot. With this in-depth, practical book readers learn the basics of chatbot design, development, and deployment by building a virtual health assistant. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

Know how to do machine learning with Microsoft technologies. This book teaches you to do predictive, descriptive, and prescriptive analyses with Microsoft Power BI, Azure Data Lake, SQL Server, Stream Analytics, Azure Databricks, HD Insight, and more. The ability to analyze massive amounts of real-time data and predict future behavior of an organization is critical to its long-term success. Data science, and more specifically machine learning (ML), is today’s game changer and should be a key building block in every company’s strategy. Managing a machine learning process from business understanding, data acquisition and cleaning, modeling, and deployment in each tool is a valuable skill set. Machine Learning with Microsoft Technologies is a demo-driven book that explains how to do machine learning with Microsoft technologies. You will gain valuable insight into designing the best architecture for development, sharing, and deploying a machine learning solution. This book simplifies the process of choosing the right architecture and tools for doing machine learning based on your specific infrastructure needs and requirements. Detailed content is provided on the main algorithms for supervised and unsupervised machine learning and examples show ML practices using both R and Python languages, the main languages inside Microsoft technologies. What You'll Learn Choose the right Microsoft product for your machine learning solutionCreate and manage Microsoft’s tool environments for development, testing, and production of a machine learning projectImplement and deploy supervised and unsupervised learning in Microsoft products Set up Microsoft Power BI, Azure Data Lake, SQL Server, Stream Analytics, Azure Databricks, and HD Insight to perform machine learning Set up a data science virtual machine and test-drive installed tools, such as Azure ML Workbench, Azure ML Server Developer, Anaconda Python, Jupyter Notebook, Power BI Desktop, Cognitive Services, machine learning and data analytics tools, and more Architect a machine learning solution factoring in all aspects of self service, enterprise, deployment, and sharing Who This Book Is For Data scientists, data analysts, developers, architects, and managers who want to leverage machine learning in their products, organization, and services, and make educated, cost-saving decisions about their ML architecture and tool set.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence, linguistics, and computer science and is concerned with the generation, recognition, and understanding of human languages, both written and spoken. NLP systems examine the grammatical structure of sentences as well as the specific meanings of words, and then they utilize algorithms to extract meaning and produce results. Machine Learning and Deep Learning in Natural Language Processing aims at providing a review of current Neural Network techniques in the NLP field, in particular about Conversational Agents (chatbots), Text-to-Speech, management of non-literal content – like emotions, but also satirical expressions – and applications in the healthcare field. NLP has the potential to be a disruptive technology in various healthcare fields, but so far little attention has been devoted to that goal. This book aims at providing some examples of NLP techniques that can, for example, restore speech, detect Parkinson’s disease, or help psychotherapists. This book is intended for a wide audience. Beginners will find useful chapters providing a general introduction to NLP techniques, while experienced professionals will appreciate the chapters about advanced management of emotion, empathy, and non-literal content.