Microsoft introduces applications to help developers make smart BOTs

Microsoft has announced 2 new applications to make it easier for the developers create smart bots. Here is a bit about both, QnA Maker and Bing Location Control.

QnA Maker Service

QnA Maker is a free, easy-to-use, REST API- and web-based service that trains Artificial intelligence to respond to users’ questions in a more natural, conversational way as compared to a conventional machine program. QnA Maker is loaded with machine learning logic and can integrate industry-leading language processing results.

It distils semi-structured data like those commonly found in website FAQs into distinct, helpful answers.

The working of QnA is kept really simple for easy bots development. You just have to feed anything starting from existing FAQ URLs to documents and editorial content. It then extracts all possible pairs of questions and answers. Using its web interface, you can edit, remove or add any question pairs, as well as test and train the knowledge base.

Once you have finalized the responses, you can publish the knowledge base as an API endpoint. It is possible to refine responses even after publishing. QnA Maker integrates with other APIs and by using other Cognitive Services it is possible to develop a simple chat box, interactive virtual guide and similar smart bots.

QnA Maker is also available as a template on Azure Bot Service. Azure Bot Service runs in a serverless environment, and enables rapid intelligent bot development powered by Microsoft Bot Framework.

Bing Location Control

Bing Location Control is an open source tool for Bot framework that lets bot developers easily get the user’s desired location within a conversation. The control is available in C# and Node.js and works consistently across all messaging channels supported by the Bot Framework.

Below are some of its key features-

• Address lookup and validation via Bing’s Maps REST services
• Address disambiguation when more than one address is found
• Support for declaring required location fields
• Support for FB Messenger’s location picker GUI dialog
• The control is open-source, with fully-customizable and localizable dialog strings

Bing Location Control is available here on Github.