Create A Conversational Bot Using Azure QnA Maker Cognitive Service🙂

Introduction

In this article, I am going to explain how to create a conversational bot with zero lines of coding using QnA Maker- Azure Cognitive Service.

What is Bot?

Bot stands for Build OperateTransfer. It is used to interact with humans conversationally. They automate the process of interacting with people on websites and social media.

QnA Maker

QnA maker is a cloud-based API that is used to create a conversational bot using the data you provided in your knowledge base. It will extract the questions along with all possible answers from the data provided so that the chatbot manages the question from the user by giving them a correct answer.

Let's get started.

Step 1

Create a new resource on the Azure portal as QnA maker.

Create A Conversational Bot Using Azure QnA Maker Cognitive Service

Step 2

Sign in to myQnA portal link, this is officially launched by Microsoft for creating a conversational bot. Once you have signed, you will get a screen as given below.

Step 3

Click "Create a knowledge base" in QnA portal. It will take you to follow five steps.

Create a QnA Service. It is already done in the Azure portal, so you can skip to the next step.

Connect your QnA service to your KB. In this step, just provide the details of your Azure subscription and Azure service that you created on the Azure portal.

Name your KB. This is the name of your bot.

Populate your KB. You can extract the questions and answers from any of your files. Supported formats are .doc, .docx , .pdf, .xlsx etc. In this example, I have given a URL to extract questions and answer. Add chit-chat by choosing one of the five pre-build personalities.
Create your KB. Once done, click "Create".

Step 4

After clicking Create, you will find the screen as given below. In this example, I've given the URL of my document from that it extracted the questions as well as the answers.

Step 5

You can test your bot manually. I have added the chit-chat as friendly.

Step 6

Publish your KB. Before that, you can add your own question and answers pairs. You can modify the existing pairs also. Click "Publish" and it will take you to the interface showing "Create Bot".

Step 7

After clicking that, it will automatically redirect to Azure QnA Service. Give credentials like application name and so on. Mostly all fields are auto-filled, you need to provide the app name only. Once done, click "Create". You can see a web app bot in your Azure portal.

Step 8

You can plan, build, test, and publish your web app in the Azure portal. Go to Channels, you can find skype, Teamcenter etc. You can configure your bot to any of your channels.

Step 9

Test your bot in the web chat. It will give the same output as you got in the QnA Maker.

Step 10

Go to build and download the source code. Open the file in Visual Studio.

Run the code in Visual Studio. It will ask you to download the emulator for bot framework.

Download the emulator and connect with the localhost. The output will be obtained in the emulator, as shown in the screenshot below.

Summary

Thanks for reading. If you have any doubts, post it as a comment. Have a nice day!!!!