Bots and Dynamics 365 Part 1 : Introduction and building a Q&A bot

For those of you who want to see a glimpse of the potential of bots in combination with Dynamics 365 check out the Microsoft Data Amp 2017 Keynote (Channel 9 recording) but also some actual reference cases such as

• Insurance goes bot – artificial intelligence deployed in customer contact (VHV Versicherungen)
• UPS paves the way for better service with faster development and artificial intelligence

Bots are officially a hype in Silicon Valley  and while stories like It begins – Bots are learning to chat in their own language might depict a bright future for bots due to the recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, developing a good bot will still require a good design and up front thinking about how you want your users to interact with the bot.  The user experience of poorly designed chat bots will frustrate users trying to perform more complex tasks. And even when this will not become a headline such as Tay, the Microsoft that pranksters trained to spew racist comments you will still have disappointed a potential customer.  But companies which start early experimenting with chat bots, are able to leverage advances in natural language processing and artificial intelligence and a number of different bot building frameworks.  The important thing to realize is that building a bot is not so much about the underlying technology but about creating a memorable customer experience – a great example is Lemonade sets new world record which show how AI handles a filed insurance claim in under 3 seconds.

Luckily, building the underlying platform has become a lot easier and Microsoft has also made available a number of different tools to help you in designing a great experience. Microsoft not only provides the Bot Framework (publicly available since April 2016) which includes a Bot Builder SDK and Developer Portal but also launched the Azure Bot Service  in the November 2016. Azure Bot Service has been built on top of the Azure Bot Framework and provides a number of templates to get started with the creation of bots. In theory you can code your bot directly from within the built-in editor but you will probably switch over to Visual Studio afterwards as well as integrate with your source code repository by downloading the generated bot code to your local machine.

One of the basic templates which is available in Azure Bot Service to write your bot is the the Question&Answer template.  To get started you need to built up a knowledgebase with questions and answers, information which might already exists in content such as FAQs, documents,etc…  Microsoft QnA Maker  will be able to use these existing sources and provides both a web interface and REST API that trains AI to respond to user’s questions in a more natural, conversational way. I took the example of https://www.statefarm.com/customer-care/faqs/auto-insurance and used it as input for QnA Maker to build up a knowledge base. Within QnA Maker itself you can test it afterwards  to see how your bot reacts to specific questions.

The next step is creating a bot using the Azure Bot Service – next to the QnA template there are also other templates available – see Bot Service templates  for more details. You can start experimenting with the bot service framework at a very low cost, the free model allows you to test it out with 10000 messages/month and you will only pay for the consumption of the underlying Azure functions  or you can use the premium pricing model which provides an SLA as well as as access to premium channels. (See Azure Bot Service pricing for more details)

After the bot service has been created, you will still need to connect it to the QnA service that you published previously by filling in the QnAKnowledgebaseId and qnASubscriptionKey in the App Settings of your bot which you can retrieve from the QnA settings page.

User interact with your bot through channels, the Azure Bot service provides fourteen channels such as Cortana, Facebook Messenger, Kik but also embedded web chat.  Web chat is the channel which is enabled by default, and you can start quite quickly by just embedding an iframe in your web 

You can also use a DirectLine (not web chat) channel, and start from the source code available on https://github.com/Microsoft/BotFramework-WebChat  to build an embeddable web chat control which is both available as a React component and a self-contained control which is easily usable by non-React websites.

But if you really want to leverage the full potential of chat bots, you will need to integrate the chat bot channel into the core systems and data repositories of your organization such as Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement and Service Management. From a Dynamics 365 perspective there are some interesting generic use cases for bots:

• Customer Service – tier one support, bots can simulate 24/7 customer service representatives and act as tier one support and escalate case for follow-up by actual customer service representatives. 
• Customer Service – appointment scheduling for servicing such as maintenance, repair, etc …
• Lead generation - an embedded chat bot in your website can answer simple product and pricing inquiries from customers and at the same time create leads.

In a next post I will delve a little deeper into how you can integrate your bot with Dynamics 365 but you can already explore this topic yourself by looking into a number of blog series on this topic such as the series from @NishantranaCRM :

• Getting started with Microsoft Bot Framework
• Using dialogs in Microsoft bot framework (creating lead in CRM)
• Using FormFlow in Microsoft Bot Framework.
• Using LUIS AI in Microsoft Bot Framework Part 1
• Using LUIS AI in Microsoft Bot Framework.- Part 2
• Publishing Bot to Azure and adding it to Skype

Other references:

• Microsoft Azure announces industry’s first cloud bot-as-a-service
• Azure Bot Service Overview (Bot Framework Preview documentation) 
• Conversational bots deep dive – What’s new with the General Availability of Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding
• Batches and batches of Bots (Coding4Fun Blog)
• Dynamics COE series on bot framework (some articles might not be applicable anymore since the Azure bot framework has undergone some significant changes in the last couple of months) is also a good starting point:
• Bot Framework: 01 – Hello World
• Bot Framework: 02 – Dialogs
• Bot Framework: 03 – Nested Dialogs
• Bot Framework: 04 – Attachments and cards
• Bot Framework: 05 – LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service)
• Bot Framework: 06 – Deploying your bot

Musings and rants about solution architecture, EA and consulting

The last year I have been working as a solution architect for a large European company as part of the EA team and I must say, it  has been quite an interesting experience. The vision/ideas that the other architects within EA have about software architecture made me explore a little bit on how software architecture has been perceived by the industry. During in this exploration I stumbled on a number of interesting articles that I want to share:

• The developers vs enterprise architects showdown: you shall know us by our trail of diagrams
• Multiple perspectives on technical problems and solutions
• The role, skills and duties of a software architect

I also became a big fan of Eric Dietrich (@daedtech) writings – so check out some of his postings

• Consulting for your current employer: make your boss your first client
• Defining the corporate hierarchy
• Hacking your career as a non-developer
• Conference speaking isn’t good  for your career until you make it good
• Learning in a world where programming skills aren’t that important
• The decline of the enterprise architect

Other architects you might also follow on Twitter include  Martin Fowler (@martin fowler) (author of a number of excellent books you should read as well) , Michael Nygard (@mtnygard)  Matt Stine (@mstine) and Simon Brown (check out his video on  Visualize, Document and explore your Software architecture). Leave a comment if you think I missed a thought leader in the software architecture space on Twitter or other blog post which you consider must reads or just interesting.

Dynamics 365 monthly reading list November 2017

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility)

• Mobile offline functionality on a tablet
• Using EWS editor to fix Dynamics 365 App for Outlook issues
• Implementing field mapping using Xrm.WebApi
• Just some tips for working with virtual entities by @andz_88
• How to create test data with GUIDs in Microsoft Dynamics 365
• Managing Dynamics 365 updates (updated article November 2017)
• Virtual entities – Relationships by
• Upgrade Adxstudio Portals v7.x to xRM Portals Community Edition
• Dynamics CRM Tip of the Day 1032: be careful with those (Javascript) function names
• Fixing missing services site map after upgrade from Dynamics 365 -  8.2 to 9.0
• Fixing Dynamics  Outlook app deployment issues
• Common Data Integration Patterns – the aggregation pattern
• Dynamics 365 portals: Liquid with a Javascript framework – vue.js
• Loading dependent javascript files in Dynamics 365 v9
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 v9.0 clientside for devs besides XRM.WebApi by @a33ik
• Where did my instance go – I hadn’t seen this glitch yet -  great tip from @DavidYack
• Register a new webhook through plugin registration tool in Dynamics 365 
• Dynamics 365 v9 unified interface icons
• CodeNow for #XrmToolbox – more than just code now… let’s get your organization POA stats this time

Topics for Dynamics 365 business analysts, project managers, power users and end users

• 4 steps that keep Microsoft Dynamics 365 implementations from running off the rails
• Dynamics 365 – a few things partners need to know better
• New automation and visualization features for business process flows (public preview)
• Dynamics 365 User Group Australia – SA Water’s digital journey and the role of Microsoft Dynamics (Youtube recording 00:20:13)
• Microsoft and Adobe build on partnership with integration of Adobe Experience Manager and Dynamics 365
• Does your CRM data resemble the walking dead?
• Release Notes for Field Service and Project Service Automation Update Release 2
• What’s new in Voice of the Customer version 9.0.823.1 to 9.0.959.8 – improved scalability – it is now possible to sent out 50.000 surveys per day
• Configuring Custom Controls for views in Dynamics 365 CE 9.0
• Using PowerApps and Microsoft Flow to simplify Dynamics 365 activity management
• List of values: optionset vs lookup
• Reports enhancements in Dynamics 365
• How to change the Panel Header of a sub grid in Dynamics 365
• It’s time to integrate Dynamics CRM and SharePoint (better) – some interesting add-ons to look into. (Remark: I haven’t tested them out yet – so don’t consider this as an official endorsement)
• Deciphering Dynamics 365 App for Outlook requirements and available features