Virtual Assistant Tour

1. The Virtual Assistant
Tour
Hi, I am your Cortana
Asish Padhy

2. Hello, Hola, Namaste,
Ni hao…
Intro
2
o Tech Lover and Enthusiast
o 14+ years of building solutions
o Architect and Developer in M365, Azure, AI and lot
many ...
@AsishPadhy

3. Agenda
Highlights
Virtual
Assistant
Virtual Assistant Intro
What it means for organization
Virtual
Assistant
Tour
Components & Template
Design Flow
Demo
My Cortana Demo
Skills and
Templates
Skills
Use Cases and Things to know
3 @AsishPadhy

4. 4
Virtual Assistant
What is a Virtual Assistant ?
o Cumulative Bots Experience tailored to your brand
o Conversational Assistant across broad range of
applications
o Personalized to Users and brand
o Extensible with Skills
o Provides a great starting point with Templates
@AsishPadhy

5. Virtual
Assistant
What it means for an
organization
5
o Get information specific to
particular business
requirements
o Create a map of existing data
with the business need
Business ownership
Own Knowledge base
o Add skills / abilities as per your
business requirement
o Provide more skillful actions for
user actions such as automated
prompts, activity tracking etc.
o Create a custom flow that
works with your business
processes
Custom abilities
Owned Processes
o Start with an existing template
build on Microsoft experiences
o Focusses on combination of
services and strength of using
each
o Build and extend as you go
Experience and build value
Starting Point
@AsishPadhy

6. 6
Virtual
Assistant
Tour
Components
o New or existing bots
o Existensible
o Programmable
o Access Points
o E.g. Teams, Emails, Web, Speech
o Document Repositories
o Line of Business databases
o CRM and Employee Systems
o Offload complexity and
intelligence
o LUIS, QNA Maker, Azure Search
@AsishPadhy

7. 7
Virtual Assistant
Template Structure
o Focus on Routing requests
o Core scalability with Dispatch tool
o Support for Telemetry (analytics)
o Support for Content Moderation
o Core support from LUIS and QnA services
o Extensibility with Skills with existing bot functionalities
Content
Moderator
Telemetry
Virtual Assistant
Dispatch
LUIS QnA
Skills
Bot
Skill 1
Bot
Skill 2
@AsishPadhy

8. Virtual Assistant Flow
Design
8
•Knowledge
Sources
•Channels
•User Inputs
•Skills
Define
•Virtual
Assistant
•QNA Maker
•Custom
Skills
Build
•Azure
Hosting
•Channel
Hosting
•AI Hosting
Deploy@AsishPadhy

9. Demo
I am your Cortana

10. Skills
Custom Abilities
10
o Provide a way to expand on available or new
conversational or AI abilities
o Addons at Organizational scope
o Skills allows to reuse existing conversational features
o Some startup template skills provided by Microsoft
E.g.
o Email Skill
o Todo Skill
o Calendar Skill
@AsishPadhy

11. Custom Skills
Skills
o Provided Skill template as a starting point
o Extend an existing custom bot to skill
o Add the skill to virtual assistant using botskills command
o Update the dispatch skill in assistant
o Support Authentication
o Available Skills CLI tool
11 @AsishPadhy

12. 12
Use cases
 Single routing interface for multiple bot
scenarios
 Automated learning platform with
extension to multiple channels
E.g.
 Customer Service Request
 Planner and Organizer
 Go to Help / Support Request
@AsishPadhy

13. 13
Things to know
 Update Template.json to customize the virtual assistant azure
resources deployment
 Quickly train QnA and LUIS using LU files in Resources folder
under Deployment
 Activate LUIS and assign authoring key to prevent service
drops
 Identify load and plan cost for Azure Search RPUs
Virtual Assistant
 Update Skills dialog for custom prompts and flow
 Deploy the skill to Virtual Assistant after complete individual testing
using bot emulator
 Don’t make skill too specific or heavy. Keep it light and scalable
 Create more granular independent skills
 Use Direct line Speech for easy accessibility
Skills
@AsishPadhy

14. 14
Help
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/bot-builder-virtual-
assistant-introduction?view=azure-bot-service-4.0
Virtual assistant
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/bot-builder-skills-
overview?view=azure-bot-service-4.0
Skills
https://github.com/microsoft/botframework-solutions/tree/master/skills/csharpSample Skills
Repo (C#)
https://microsoft.github.io/botframework-solutions/virtual-assistant/tutorials/create-
assistant/csharp/1-intro/
Create Virtual
Assistant
https://microsoft.github.io/botframework-solutions/skills/tutorials/create-
skill/csharp/1-intro/
Create Skill
@AsishPadhy

15. THANK YOU!
Asish Padhy
Twitter
@asishpadhy
LinkedIn
https://linkedin.com/in/asishpadhy
Blog
https://asishpadhy.com