Global Azure Virtual 2020 UK and Ireland

Last weekend I took part in the annual event Global Azure Virtual 2020 (UK and Ireland).

Global Azure is an initiative created by the community for the community and takes place (as the name suggest!) – around the world.

This virtual event was hosted over 3 days, featured 50+ presentations and had 20+ live sessions.

Live sessions were streamed using Microsoft Teams with pre-recorded sessions being hosted on a dedicated YouTube channel.

My live session was focussed on the Bot Framework, Natural Language Understanding and lasted for 45 minutes.  I broke the session into 3 “micro-sessions” which spanned the chatbot development lifecycle.

Some of the topics that I covered included:

• Introduction to the Bot Framework
• Overview of Natural Language Understanding with LUIS
• Coding chatbots in Visual Studio
• Publishing and testing chatbots in Azure

I took a deeper dive into Dialogs and introduced Adaptive Dialogs (a cool new addition to the Bot Framework) as well as highlighting the key components of chatbot code such as LUIS integration and parsing data that LUIS can surface.

All of this was done within the context of a flight booking chatbot that showed attendees how chatbots can understand human language, ask questions then use that input to drive conversational logic.

The chatbot was then published in Azure where further testing could be applied by using out of the box webchat components!

Community

Massive thanks to everyone who made this happen, to Microsoft staff for giving me a nudge about the event and to organisers for giving me the chance to contribute!

If anyone would like a copy of the slide deck or code I went through, let drop a comment below or send me a message on Twitter and I will share.