Using Microsoft Bot in applications and report make them more agile and interactive.

there are many ways to use Microsoft Bot.

In this posts and the next one, I will explain how to create a Microsoft Bot in Azure and then embed it in your PowerBI and messenger like Facebook messenger or Telegram.

How to start

The first step is to create a Web App Bot  in Azure

When you creating Web App Bot, it will ask you about the Bot template :

As you can see in below picture, there are five different Bot Template there.

• Basic (just echo your statement)
• Form (collect information from the user, for instance, to get information about the food order)
• Language Understanding (NLP)
• Question and Answer: it can be used for FAQ
• Proactive

To show the template, I start with a basic one that just echoes the user statement.

after the creation of the Web App bot for the basic purpose,  in the main page, click on the Text in Webchat and “This is Leila” 🙂 , the Bot just repeat the statement, that means bot is running. The C# code behind this Bot is available under the Build option (will show soon)

After creating, the apps, Click on the Channels, where you able to find the application that you able to publish you Bot. As you can see below there are two main ways.

you able to embed the Bot in a website, Like Emde the code in Power BI dashboard tile (will show the example soon) or deploy an application like Skype, Email, Facebook Messenger and Telegram.

Now I click on the Get Bot Embed Code  and copy the code

after clicking on the link, it navigates you to Configure Web Chat, there you able to access the embed code and replace it with the secret code shows in above box

Now navigate to powerbi.microsoft.com/  click on Workspace-> Dashboard-> Create

to create a new dashboard.

After creating a new dashboard, create a new tile, then add Web Content.

By adding the Web Content, you need to provide some details such as Title, Subtitle, the embed code (you already get it from Bot channel)

Now you just need to check the Bot. in the Text area, type “This is Leila” and you will see the same answer in chat channel in Azure.

This a very simple example of how to embed a chatbot here.

But The echo one is not our desire, we want an intelligence chatbot. In the next Post, I will show you how to create a Form for ordering the food for a conference via chatbot.

Leila Etaati

Trainer, Consultant, Mentor

Leila is the first Microsoft AI MVP in New Zealand and Australia, She has Ph.D. in Information System from the University Of Auckland. She is the Co-director and data scientist in RADACAD Company with more than 100 clients in around the world. She is the co-organizer of Microsoft Business Intelligence and Power BI Use group (meetup) in Auckland with more than 1200 members, She is the co-organizer of three main conferences in Auckland: SQL Saturday Auckland (2015 till now) with more than 400 registrations, Difinity (2017 till now) with more than 200 registrations and Global AI Bootcamp 2018. She is a Data Scientist, BI Consultant, Trainer, and Speaker. She is a well-known International Speakers to many conferences such as Microsoft ignite, SQL pass, Data Platform Summit, SQL Saturday, Power BI world Tour and so forth in Europe, USA, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. She has over ten years’ experience working with databases and software systems. She was involved in many large-scale projects for big-sized companies. She also AI and Data Platform Microsoft MVP. Leila is an active Technical Microsoft AI blogger for RADACAD.