Every year somewhere at the end of September Microsoft’s biggest conference Ignite attracts thousands of people with a massive amount of news and big announcements. To keep up with all these awesome news is nearly impossible, as there is so much to explore in this very short period of time. Therefore, I try to sum up and link to all big announcements and news Microsoft made during the Ignite 2018 on the topic of conversational AI…

In the “jungle” of documentation and resources on the internet nowadays, it’s tough to keep the overview and know where to look for in order to seek new information about certain topics. Microsoft is now trying to unify the documentation across their products in order to have 1 place to go for. But until that is fully established, we need to conduct multiple resources. To overcome this issue in the field of the Azure Bot Service, I already released a resource cheat sheet in order to have all important sources in your pocket.

Nowadays, there is a ton of information out there for every service Microsoft has released, which is a good thing. But there are times when you search for something special, but you can’t find it as there are too many sites and resources which you need to crawl to find what you are looking for. The same is true for the Azure Bot Service and the MS Bot Framework, as there is plenty of documentation, but it is spread over a couple of different sites.

“Copy, paste… Bot!” - This is the slogan of the QnAMaker.ai service, which is one of the Cognitive Services  in the knowledge category. This service offers a very easy-to-use toolset for creating, populating and publishing knowledgebases for FAQs which can be consumed by the Azure Bot Service very easy to build smart QnA Bots in a very short period of time. As the creation of such a QnAMaker knowledgebase is straightforward, the following infographic should help illustrate the process of creating, populating, testing and publishing a KB through the QnAMaker service.

A couple of months ago, I did a post about the Microsoft Cognitive Services with an infographic attached in order to better understand the various services and offerings in that area. Now a couple of months later, some things changed in that field, especially the offerings and the services (some disappeared, some have been merged and some appeared). Therefore, I updated my infographic in order to reflect the current services which are available:

A couple of weeks ago at the Microsoft Build conference (see this post for details on the announcements concerning AI), there were some cool new tools for the Bot Builder announced. These tools are already in preview and can be downloaded here . The following table should give an overview of the new tools released: Tool Description Chatdown Prototype mock conversations in markdown and convert the markdown to transcripts you can load and view in the new V4 Bot Framework Emulator MSBot Create and manage connected services in your bot configuration file LUDown Build LUIS language understanding models using markdown filese LUIS Build LUIS language understanding models using markdown files QnAMaker Create and manage QnAMaker.