Bots have a huge range of uses, including being used as virtual assistants, customer service reps, web app or microservice front ends,  and much more. Bots communicate naturally with customers and internal teams alike to provide intelligent, targeted solutions for nearly every business type.

Teams use Azure bots in part because of the tight integration they offer with most other Azure services. One common example is combining bots with AI services, to combine intelligent bots capable of understanding and responding intelligently to end-user comments. In this lab, you'll create an Azure bot, integrate it with the Azure Cognitive Services API to allow it to guess the sentiment of end-users, and publish that bot to Azure Bot Service.

Lab Objectives

Upon completion of this lab you will be able to:

• Create Azure bots in a Node.js environment, using Yeoman
• Interact locally with the bot using the Bot Framework Emulator
• Integrate the bot with Azure Cognitive Services API
• Deploy it to Azure Bot Service using the Azure CLI and Azure Resource Manager

Intended Audience

This lab is intended for:

• Developers
• Cloud engineers
• Anyone aiming to implement AI or machine learning within their workflow

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with:

• The principles of Node.js is helpful but not required
• The principles of the Azure Portal is helpful but not required
• Basic skills in Powershell is useful