Create a Microsoft Teams bot using Node JS Earlier, we saw What is a Chatbot and how it works, in that we understood the different types of chatbots like.
- Conversational Chatbots
- AI-powered Chatbots
- Task-Oriented Chatbots
And we also came to know the various platforms that support custom Chatbots. From that, we see a couple of examples of how to create a chatbot for Microsoft Teams using Node JS in this article and the SDKs used to develop the same.
Create a boilerplate code using the Teams Toolkit
There are multiple ways to create a chatbot for Teams, but Microsoft has provided an easy way to create the chatbot with the ready-to-start.
- Boilerplate code.
- File structure, including the .env files separately for local / dev/prod environments.
- Provisioning for build code.
- Provisioning for deployment with templates and manifests.
With that said, let’s open the Visual Studio Code.
1. Go to the marketplace, search for the team's toolkit, and install the extension provided by Microsoft.
2. Once installed, click on the Teams Toolkit icon from the added extension and choose Create a new app.
3. For creating a bot, choose Bot as a template.
4. Basic Bot
5. Programming language of your choice, I choose javascript.
6. Set the workplace folder by browsing the path.
7. Provide a name for the application. Remember! This app name will be chosen as default while provisioning in the Azure cloud as well.
8. App is now created with the folder structure and base code.
9. Run the program either by pressing F5, assuming you have Microsoft Teams installed on your machine and sideloading is enabled in your tenant. If you go to the same Teams Toolkit extension, it will now look like this.
10. If you don’t have MS Teams, no worries; you can run through the command from the terminal.
npm run dev:teamsfx*
To start the conversation, you need to have the Bot Framework Emulator application installed on your PC. Installation link --> https://github.com/Microsoft/BotFramework-Emulator/releases.
11. Click on Open Bot and provide the bot URL.
> http://localhost:3978/api/messages
Important note. Check your .localconfigs file; if the bot ID and password are automatically generated, then you need to provide them in the Microsoft App ID and Microsoft App password in the pop-up box.
12. Bot will give you a status code of 200 and start running as the MS Teams app.
While this chatbot is a basic sample bot, you can create additional functionalities like weather bots, currency converters, simple calculators, FAQs, and so on.
I know this is quite big to follow and hard to understand at first. If you need any support, feel free to reach out to me.
If you are interested in a more specific solution in this regard, please leave a comment below.
Please see this is a follow-up from the series Chatbots.
- What is a chatbot, and how does it work
- Create a Telegram bot using Node JS
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