In the modern AI-enabled world, digital agents or bots (aka chatbots) are an extremely hot topic, which every company no matter of their industry will at least think about at the moment. Many big software vendors like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, you name it are offering their own set of tools and services which developers and architects can use in order to build such a conversational AI interface (aka chatbot). But in this modern world, it is always about being fast and have a short time to market, which often results in releases which are not quite ready.

Almost a year ago I published one of my first infographics which should visualize the various components of the Microsoft Bot Framework. Back then, the Bot Framework was available in version 3.0 and as you can imagine, since then there have been a lot of updates and changes. Some weeks ago, Microsoft announced that version 4.0 is now GA with many improvements and enhancements. Therefore, I decided to update my version of the infographic in order to visualize what changed and what’s important when talking about the Bot Framework, which I also renamed the “Microsoft Conversational AI Landscape”:

Every year somewhere at the end of September Microsoft’s biggest conference Ignite attracts thousands of people with a massive amount of news and big announcements. To keep up with all these awesome news is nearly impossible, as there is so much to explore in this very short period of time. Therefore, I try to sum up and link to all big announcements and news Microsoft made during the Ignite 2018 on the topic of conversational AI…

In the “jungle” of documentation and resources on the internet nowadays, it’s tough to keep the overview and know where to look for in order to seek new information about certain topics. Microsoft is now trying to unify the documentation across their products in order to have 1 place to go for. But until that is fully established, we need to conduct multiple resources. To overcome this issue in the field of the Azure Bot Service, I already released a resource cheat sheet in order to have all important sources in your pocket.

Nowadays, there is a ton of information out there for every service Microsoft has released, which is a good thing. But there are times when you search for something special, but you can’t find it as there are too many sites and resources which you need to crawl to find what you are looking for. The same is true for the Azure Bot Service and the MS Bot Framework, as there is plenty of documentation, but it is spread over a couple of different sites.

“Copy, paste… Bot!” - This is the slogan of the QnAMaker.ai service, which is one of the Cognitive Services in the knowledge category. This service offers a very easy-to-use toolset for creating, populating and publishing knowledgebases for FAQs which can be consumed by the Azure Bot Service very easy to build smart QnA Bots in a very short period of time. As the creation of such a QnAMaker knowledgebase is straightforward, the following infographic should help illustrate the process of creating, populating, testing and publishing a KB through the QnAMaker service.