If we observe the current technology trends, BOT is quite popular. Most of the modern solutions come with BOT to automate tasks and respond to the conversation.
In simple terms, a bot is a software application that automates tasks that are repetitive in nature and respond without human interaction. A bot is a short form of robot.
Azure Bot Service
An Azure bot service is a complete development platform for developing enterprise-grade bot solutions. This environment enables the development of high-quality conversational AI experiences bots for all possible scenarios. This service has the capability to build multimodal and multilingual bots.
Key Features of Azure Bot Service
Some of the key features are listed below:
- Comprehensive development experiences
- Powered by industry standard AI
- Easy to implement and rich documentation support
- Open source with reusable sample components
- Add natural language, speech, and vision
- Enterprise-grade security, compliance, and availability
- Multilanguage support and multimodal
- Built-in usable components
In this article, I will illustrate step by step how to create Azure bot service. This bot service will give the option to register your bot.
Prerequisites: Azure subscriptions.
Create an Azure Bot Service
Login to Azure Portal with your subscription or create a trial one.
https://portal.office.com
After login, we will see the home portal page as shown below.
Once we are login, we need to click in Create a resource as shown:
We can search for Azure Bot as portrayed below and select Azure bot.
After selecting, you will get a create option with some more information as portrayed
Azure plans
There is only one plan, Azure bot as a software plan as shown.
Now, we create a bot by clicking on the create button. Then we need to enter the required values for Azure Bot service.
- Bot handle: The Bot Handle is a mandatory field, and is a unique identifier for your bot. You can choose a different Display Name for your bot in the Settings blade after bot creation.
- Subscription
- Resource Group
- Pricing Tier
- Microsoft App ID
Pricing tier
The Azure Bot Service has two pricing tiers.
- F0 Free: this is a free tier with no cost with a total of 10K premium messages, bot creation tools, and free standard channels.
- S1 standard: this tier is paid version of 0.50 USD per 1000 Messages (estimated). This tier comes with 1K premium messages per unit, Bot creation tools, free standard channel, and 99.9% SLA.
We will have two options for Microsoft App ID: Create a new Microsoft App ID or use existing App registration.
We should add Tags. Tags are name/value pairs that enable you to categorize resources and view consolidated billing by applying the same tag to multiple resources and resource groups.
After filling in all the necessary fields, we will click on the Review + Create button.
Review will validate the input fields and do validation as shown.
Since the validation is passed, we can now proceed to create Azure Bot service.
Once the bot service is created, we will get the following screen with message deployment completion.
We can click on deployment details to know more information on this service.
We have successfully created the Azure Bot Service.
Open the azure bot service, we will see the following Bot service screen.
This is how we can create an Azure bot Service.
The app secret (password) is stored in the key vault and there is one key vault per resource group. Using a key vault is recommended instead of copying and storing sensitive data.
To run or deploy the bot solution, app ID and password is required.
Conclusion
In this write-up, I have introduced what a bot is and how it works. I have also elaborated azure bot service and its key features. Additionally, I have portrayed step by step to create an azure bot service in Azure Portal.
References
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