Contents
Creating a Chatbot on Azure
The course starts by providing a quick overview of some of Azure’s AI services and what you're going to build.
You'll then be shown:
- How to create a searchable knowledge base using the question answering service
- How to create a bot and connect it to the knowledge base
- How to create a web chat app and connect it to the bot
- How to enable spoken input and output in the chatbot
Learning Objectives
- Describe Azure AI services
- Create a knowledge base using the question answering service
- Create a bot and connect it to the knowledge base
- Create a web chat app and connect it to the bot
- Enable spoken input and output
Intended Audience
- Azure AI engineers
Prerequisites
- Experience with Azure
- Experience with writing code (not mandatory)
Resources
The GitHub repository for this course is at https://github.com/cloudacademy/azure-chatbot.
Our goal is to build a chatbot that can answer questions about a particular product based on a Frequently Asked Questions page. The idea is that this bot could handle basic technical support requests from customers. I’ll also explain how to give a bot the ability to accept spoken questions and to respond verbally, which would make it easier to use for people with impaired vision and people on mobile devices.
Building this sort of application from scratch would take a huge amount of effort, but luckily, Microsoft has a number of services that are designed to help us build one.
The most important one is Azure Bot Service, which has the core components needed for a chatbot. It also integrates with Azure Cognitive Services, which is a collection of pre-built artificial intelligence tools. These services let you add AI capabilities to applications even if you don’t know anything about machine learning.
For example, the conversational language understanding (or CLU) service can be used to help your bot better understand the meaning of messages it receives from users.
In this course, we’ll be using another language-related service called “question answering”, which is a component of Azure Cognitive Service for Language. It lets you create a knowledge base from collections of questions and answers. That’s exactly what we need for our chatbot.
Another useful service in the Cognitive Services suite is the Speech service, which can be used to add voice capabilities to a bot.
In the next lesson, we’ll get started building our chatbot, so if you’re ready, go to the next video.
Guy launched his first training website in 1995 and he's been helping people learn IT technologies ever since. He has been a sysadmin, instructor, sales engineer, IT manager, and entrepreneur. In his most recent venture, he founded and led a cloud-based training infrastructure company that provided virtual labs for some of the largest software vendors in the world. Guy’s passion is making complex technology easy to understand. His activities outside of work have included riding an elephant and skydiving (although not at the same time).