Microsoft has GAed the Azure Bot Service a couple of weeks ago, which was a huge step forward for all of us who are doing bots and AI apps in the Microsoft ecosystem. With this step, Microsoft is also pushing one more area into the Azure portal which is bots. Remember, during the preview, you had to create your bot in the Bot Framework portal and add your channels and everything related to your bot in that specific portal.

Have you ever faced the issue of looking at more than 200.000 lines of code after creating a freshFunctions Bot via theAzure Portal? Well, I have unfortunately and I didn’t know where to put my code in this massive amount of NodeJS code. As a lightweight developer, I am not that familiar in reading someone else’s code so I didn’t want to spend hours in studying the code below in order to get an idea where to put my code into.

The terms “Modern Workplace” or “Digital Workplace” is something every one of us have heard about in the last couple of months probably. It is some trend which should improve the workplace situation in order to digitally transform the way we work and make it more easier to communicate and collaborate with others. Therefore, the use of smart services can be beneficial when it comes to really transforming your workplace into a modern one.

With the announcement of the GA status of the Language Understanding Intelligent Service a couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about how to easily enable people in using this awesome Cognitive Service. I was asked many times on how to easily use that service but I faced a lot of open questions and confusion. That’s why I decided to create a cheat sheet to illustrate the process of creating, training and publishing a LUIS model in order to use it within a Bot or other apps which should act intelligent and understand the human language.

“Artificial intelligence productivity for every developer and every scenario” - this is the slogan which is shown on the landing page of the Microsoft AI Platform . But many people don’t know which services are included in this broad AI ecosystem. It is not only about Bots or Machine Learning - it’s about much more like Cognitive Services, it’s about the tools used for developing AI apps and the frameworks underneath all those great and intelligent services.

Yesterday I wanted to deploy a new bot with the Azure Bot Service to start developing a new digital assistant within the Azure Bot Framework platform. But as I created my bot from the Azure portal I ran into a strange error upon testing the bot immediately, which you can see below: As you can see the bot’s function started, but it didn’t finish successfully and in the test window I got the error message “couldn’t send retry” which was quite strange as I didn’t modify the code at all.