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 brings to bear. 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. Bots built with the Microsoft Bot Framework can easily be integrated with multiple channels like a web site, Skype, Slack, Facebook, and even Cortana.

By optionally 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. In particular the Language Understanding Intelligent Service, LUIS, lets you add conversational intelligence to give your bot a natural flow.

All of this can be built on top of ASP.NET, or node.js if you’re so inclined. We’ll focus on ASP.NET and C# in the workshop. 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 traceilibyt 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.