Building Chatbots In Typescript With The Microsoft Bot Framework Programming Useful Bots In The Nodejs Sdk

If you've been paying attention to all the recent developer conferences, you'll notice that chatbots (or bots) are becoming all the rage. Both Microsoft and Facebook have invested heavily in technology to help create bots for their own messaging platforms, with Microsoft creating a framework for cross-platform messaging interaction called the Bot Framework. Why all this attention? Advances in artificial intelligence like natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision have made identifying things like intention and sentiment a lot easier for applications. Bots are the first attempt at bringing this power to everyday users in a context that exists outside of standard search engines. But in all fairness, let's be brutally honest: It's easy to build a bot; It's hard to build a useful bot. This book will introduce you to the concept of chatbots as the next frontier of the user interface (UI), and will use the Microsoft Bot Framework and the Azure Bot Service as the technology to help you build a bot that's truly useful. By the time you are done with this book, you should be confident that you can build your own chatbot from end-to-end using TypeScript, the Bot Framework, and Azure. Topics covered include: Activities, Dialogs & Prompts Message Factories d104 Recognizers Natural Language Processing with LUIS & QnA Maker Rich Card Attachments & Adaptive Cards Storage Speech Middleware Proactive Messages Bot Framework Emulator Testing Chatbots with Mocha MSBot, Chatdown & LUDown End-to-End Tooling In addition, you will be walked through three complete chatbots from beginning to end, including a console bot, a chatbot for reading a web site's RSS feed, and a full conference bot.