This course is designed for a technical audience.

This course will ramp up the attendee quickly on the Microsoft Bot Framework as a development tool/portal and the Cognitive Services APIs for intelligence, linking the two in the creation of an intelligent chat bot for conversational platforms.

Through the use of several hands on labs, the course will introduce several core concepts related to Bots Development/Design including Testing Methodologies, Monitoring Bot Health, UI Controls, etc. In addition, integration of LUIS will also be discussed allowing attendees to build very powerful bots.

1. Visual Studio 2015 (Community version is ok).
2. A Microsoft Account to log into the Bot Framework developer portal, which you will use to register your Bot as well as to sign up for Cognitive Services subscriptions (if you have Hotmail, Live, Outlook.com, or an Xbox account then you already have a Microsoft Account).
3. The Bot Framework Emulator.
4. The Bot Framework Visual Studio Template (C#).
5. (Optional) Github for Windows (comes with Git Shell) or git on other systems to download this repository.
6. (Optional) An Azure account for an Azure-accessible REST endpoint (for registering your bot with the Bot Framework service).
7. (Optional) Developer accounts on one or more communication services (such as Facebook) where your Bot will communicate (Skype is already set up for you).
8. (Optional) An Azure App Insights account to capture telemetry on your bot.

Principles of Bot Design
Prioritize the right factors when designing your bot and learn about what factors guarantee a bot's success.

Types of Bots
Discover different bot categories and the pros/cons of a generalized bot vs. a specialized bot or a stateless bot vs. to stateful bot, etc.

Microsoft Bot Framework
Discover the different components of Microsoft Bot Framework and how you can connect to different channels. Learn also about configuring channel specific features and making your bots available.

Cognitive Services Integration with Bots
Through Cognitive Services API, discover how you can quickly add intelligence to your bot. Explore the different APIs available (Vision, Text, Video, Search, etc.) for your bots.

Testing Bots
Learn various ways of testing your bots: Unit Tests with Bots, Using Ngrok for Testing and Direct Line API testing.

Bot Health Monitor - Telemetry
Learn how to track your bot application health using real time telemetry. This will help in identifying issues and fine tuning your application.

Introduction to LUIS
Discover how you can add language understanding capability to your bot application using LUIS. With LUIS, you can use preexisting pre-built models from Bing whenever they suit your purposes and when you need specialized models, LUIS guides you through the process of quickly building them.