Microsoft Ignite September 26-30, 2016 Atlanta, GA

At the confluence of the rise in messaging applications, advances in text and language processing, and mobile form factors, bots are emerging as a key area of innovation and excitement. Bots (or conversation agents) are rapidly becoming an integral part of your digital experience--they are as vital a way for people to interact with a service or application as is a web site or a mobile experience. Developers writing bots all face the same problems: bots require basic I/O, they must have language and dialog skills, and they must connect to people--preferably in any conversation experience and language a person chooses. This code-heavy talk focuses on how to solve these problems using the Microsoft Bot Framework, a set of tools and services to easily build bots and add them to any application. We'll cover use cases and customer case studies for enhancing an application with a bot, and how to build a bot--focusing on each of the key problems: how to integrate with various messaging services, how to connect to users, and how to process language to understand the user's intent.