Azure, Community, Tools and Applications

General Availability of Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding (LUIS)

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While preparing my Workshop slides for this Saturdays session in Cologne on “Deploy your bot to Azure App services” I found yesterday the Azure Bot Service got GA in West Europe and North Europe. Together with the announcement the blog post includes a deep dive on what you can do using Azure Bot Services.

Following Microsofts vision, LUIS is “a machine learning-based service to build natural language into apps, bots, and IoT devices.“, which enables you to quickly create your custom models that continuously improve for understanding your users intend when using simple language.

For the Azure Bot Services, in their blog post Microsoft says using that will this will speed up your bot development, as they offer you an integrated environment in Visual Studio (and other tools if you really need that) with the Microsoft Bot Framework channels, development tools and hosting solutions. This is a list of features ment to improve your bot

  • Connect with your audience with no code modifications via our supported channels on the Bot Service; Office 365 Email, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Cortana, Skype for Business. There is some more supported channels mentioned on the blog post, but for me it figured about that the ones mentioned here are the most interesting and ommonly used by my audience
  • Bot Service is now integrated into the Azure portal; easy access to 24×7 support, monitoring capabilities, integrated billing and more in the trusted Azure ecosystem.
  • Azure Bot Services are generally available in 9 different regions. West Europe and North Europe are the most impportant for my customers. Furthermore bot services are available in West US, East US, Southeast Asia, Australia Southeast, Australia East, Brazil South, and East Asia regions.

If you’re not familiar with Bots and building your own bot, the following Blog post “Programming with the Microsoft Bot Framework” by Stefano Tempesta / published by Max Melcher maybe is a good place to go next.