Building the future today means adding intelligence to your apps. In the modern world, that means taking advantage of the cloud and the huge power it can provide. In this workshop, Brian will show you how to put a UI on artificial intelligence by teaching you how to build multi-channel bots using the Microsoft Bot Framework and Cognitive Services. You can easily integrate bots built with the Microsoft Bot Framework with multiple channels like a web site, Skype, Slack, Facebook, and even Cortana.

By adding Cognitive Services to your apps, you can add powerful algorithms to see, hear, speak, understand, and interpret our needs using natural methods of communication with just a few lines of code. You'll learn about the various services and how you use the smarts behind them to make your apps even better. The Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) in particular lets you add conversational intelligence to give your bot a natural flow.

You can build all this on top of ASP.NET, or node.js if you're so inclined. We'll focus on ASP.NET and C# in the workshop though. In addition, like all apps, you'll want to wrap your app in a solid DevOps practice so you'll see how you can host your code in Visual Studio Team Services, have full traceability with work item tracking, use Team Build for quality with unit tests, and use the Release Management tools to control updates to your bot via a full CI/CI pipeline. By the end of the day, you'll have all the code and notes to add intelligence to your solutions.

You will learn:

• All about bots and why you want to use them
• How to let the cloud do the heavy lifting on your bot's brains
• How to put a good DevOps process around your bot development