Parshuram's Blog

I wanted to help my daughter with the maths multiplication tables, but it gets painful when you repeat it again & again :( I was thinking of creating something with Bot Framework or Cortana skills, but those does not seems to be fit for purpose due to my previous experiences. Then comes Amazon Echo, and Alexa seems more promising. Decided to create an Alexa skill so that daughter can invoke it and ask for the maths table by herself. First thing we need is Amazon Alexa skill developer account. Head to below url & register for your account. https://developer.amazon.com/ Once registered, we can create a new Alexa skill. Creating skill is a step by step process. 1. Skill Information In skill info, we need to select Languages to support. Also the Name & Invocation Name for the skill. 2. Interaction Model Next is the Interaction model. Here we have to configure our intent & sample utterances. These are the sentences which we are suppose to s...

Microsoft has provided an easy to use QnA Maker service which gives ability to build, train and publish a simple question and answer bot based on FAQ URLs, structured documents or editorial content in minutes. Just register on below url. https://qnamaker.ai/ Once registered it gives option to create new service. After creating the new service, it gives option to input a FAQ page url or upload FAQ files (formats - .tsv, .pdf, .doc, .docx, .xlsx) or start with blank data & enter your own questions and answers. For the article I choose FAQ url, once the url is entered, service scans the content from the page & creates the Knowledge Base. The knowledge base can be trained & saved and can be published to be used in the bot or any other application. Service also provide a very handy interface to Test the request response. Just use the "Test" option on the left hand side. Now as our QnA service is published, we can go to Azure portal & cre...

Lets build a simple conversation bot who will decode our emotions & will try to cheer us. Basic Idea is to get, how the user is feeling now, then pass the feelings to Cognitive services & get the sentiment score. If the sentiment score is high or neutral then pop a joke to the user. If the sentiment score is low, try to show a motivational message. Hope everyone has the environment setup for the bot app, else just check my earlier blog post First we need to create a new bot project. Choose Bot Application Give it a name & lets start exploring. The project will create a controller - MessagesController.cs which is the starting point for our bot. Controller consists of a task Post which handles the messages received by the bot. It should look like below. I am just trying to pass the flow to a RootDialog which is bot framework dialog. The RootDialog looks like this RootDialog welcomes the user & asks about how he/she is feeling now. Those fee...

Bots are the talk of the town now a days and Microsoft Bot Framework is one of the leading Bot framework. After creating few bot with help from the internet, thinking of collating some of the good resources to start creating bots using Microsoft Bot Framework. So here are few really good resources to start with. 1. First thing to check is https://dev.botframework.com/ This is the site one need to visit for registering the account & creating new bots. It also have lots of resources on how to create one. 2. Once the account is setup, have a look at the youtube channel of James Mann. The videos are very informative & helps build the different stuff with bots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLcFx6qcMQE&list=PLgF-CyaX1p3FE55OTRNH-kOb16zqeBZCo 3. You will need to download the dev environment and you will need VS 2015 or VS 2017. VS for Mac currently not supported. https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/ 4. Once the dev environment is setup, you will need the d...

Microsoft Cognitive services provides lots of APIs. One that caught my attention recently is Text Analytics API. Below is a snippet for using the Text Analytics features to find the Sentiment score of the user input. There are endless possibilities to use it. Happy Coding Parshuram