Last Fri­day I vi­si­ted the Chat­bot-in-a-day work­shop in Munich.

This was of­fe­red by Mi­cro­soft in coope­ra­ti­on with oran­ge net­works and gave us par­ti­ci­pants a com­pre­hen­si­ve over­view of the world of chatbots.

Sin­ce I am cur­r­ent­ly working on a pro­ject to find out which chat­bot frame­works are sui­ta­ble for po­ten­ti­al use in the com­pa­ny, the work­shop was just right for me.

At the be­gin­ning of the day a short in­tro­duc­to­ry pre­sen­ta­ti­on about chat­bots in ge­ne­ral and the Mi­cro­soft Bot Frame­work and its com­pon­ents followed.

The first to­pic on which we par­ti­ci­pants were al­lo­wed to be­co­me ac­ti­ve our­sel­ves was the crea­ti­on of new dia­logs wi­t­hin the bot. The­se form the equi­va­lent of a con­ven­tio­nal user interface.

The spea­kers first ex­p­lai­ned ba­sic func­tio­n­a­li­ties to us and we were then al­lo­wed to put them into prac­ti­ce on our own.

In this way, we gra­du­al­ly ad­ded an in­ter­face to the Azu­re Se­arch ser­vice and in­te­gra­ted ad­van­ced tech­no­lo­gies such as Ad­ap­ti­ve­Cards into the bot. Fi­nal­ly, we in­ser­ted an AI ba­sed text re­co­gni­ti­on into the bot so that it can call dia­logs de­pen­ding on the user’s intention.

A short feed­back round fol­lo­wed at the end of the day. Af­ter many new in­sights the work­shop was al­rea­dy over.