Practical Bot Development: Designing and Building Bots with Node.js and Microsoft Bot Framework

Chapter 1: Introducing Bots
- Motivation: apps vs bots and interacting with computers using Natural Language Interfaces. Google Now, Siri, Alexa. Great progress in recent years in both translation, voice recognition and natural language understanding technologies. Democratization of AI and Machine Learning APIs. Bots as a new way of implementing user interfaces.
- Use Case: describe a bot to help users order tickets
- Use it to describe the following concepts:
- Natural language recognition
- Text conversations
- Rich media conversations
- Bot-led conversations
- Human hand off
- Embedding into messaging apps
Chapter 2: Bot User Design (UX)
- Motivation: there is a good way for bots to communicate to you and there is a bad way. This chapter will distill some common "good" approaches to a bot and Also show some examples of bad communication.
- conversational User Experience
- Text vs rich conversations
- Bot initiated conversations
- Perceived performance
- Personalized content
- Concise and clear messaging
- Consistent voice
- Do one thing well, provide value
Chapter 3: Natural Language Understanding
- Motivation: part of the reason bots are becoming a thing is that natural language recognition technologies are widely available and easier to use.
- Intent classification
- Entity Extractors - Named Entity Extraction
- LUIS
- How to create a model
- How to train LUIS to recognize intents and entities (use ticket ordering bot as a use case)
- Action Fulfillment -  not used in LUIS anymore, but still used in cloud based, intent-led bot frameworks. It is interesting to know when creating bots.
Chapter 4: Introducing Microsoft Bot Builder Framework
- Motivation: cloud bot services vs bot as a web service models. We favor bot as a web service model for ease of use, control, extensibility etc.
- MSFT bot builder framework - what is it?
- Node.js and why we use the Node.js version vs the C# version
- Core concepts
- Intro to emulator
- Node.js samples
- How to run sample
- Some basic bot samples
Chapter 5: Dive into Bot Builder
- Motivation: we need to go over the different concepts inside the bot builder framework and how they help us build bots.
- Dialogs
- Messages
- Connector
- Channels
- Conversation State
- Recognizers
- Actions
- Proactive messages
Chapter 6: Putting it all together
- Motivation: Build a sample bot that uses all of the concepts in the previous chapter
- Back to ordering tickets bot - lots of coding
Chapter 7: Advanced bot builder topics
- Motivation: Expand sample from #6 with some more advanced concepts like proactive messaging, better dialog management, custom recognizers, deeper action support, group chats, etc.
- Lots of code here
Chapter 8: Deploying to Channels and sending custom data
- Motivation: a bot is useless unless it is connected to a channel. Let's see how this is done. We introduce the bot framework web site.
- Focus on Messenger and Slack
- Show some custom functionality such as messenger square cards or slack updating messages
Chapter 9: Custom channels
- Motivation: sometimes you would like to support a custom channel that is not supported out of the box by Microsoft. How do we do this?
- Using direct line
- Using vani