Something new on the scene for Microsoft is the Azure Bot Service. There are many patterns for creating a bot app, so your users can interact with it in a conversational way. A bot may be as simple as basic pattern matching with a response, or it may be a sophisticated weaving of artificial intelligence techniques with complex conversational state tracking and integration to existing business services.
Let’s look at 4 common bot patterns:
1. Information Retrieval – Simply put; ask questions, get answers. I’m sure you’ve gone to a site and a little bot pops up asking, how can I help you today? Then you put in a question about what you’re looking for. The bot is designed to look at the information in your question, retrieve the necessary info and give you an answer. As a business, it enhances your capabilities to provide opportunity and context for your users. You get customer interaction without having to hire people to do so.
2. Transactional – Here, you look up something and you want to do an action. Take a bot that runs your bank, for example. Through Q & A interaction, you can conduct a transaction, maybe open a savings account at the bank. For your organization, this helps drive people to a decision and helps them through a process to conduct a transaction.
3. Advice – Bots can provide guidance/advice based on the question asked. So, it’s tax season and I can ask my tax advisor (who’s my bot), will claiming my dog as a dependent increase my chances of being audited? The bot will be able to look and see expert advice by using “dog” and “dependent” in the same sentence and give advice – which will likely be, it’s a bad idea. As a business, you can put together information and interaction and provide advice to your users.
4. Social Conversation – Here, you can have interaction with sentiment. You’re a restaurant owner and someone types into your site that the food was awful, who should I talk to? The bot service can look at that context, interact with them and offer an apology and something to fix the issue, a gift card, perhaps. Or ask if they’d like to leave a message for the cook or manager.
These are just a few ways you can use bots to leverage the data and wealth of information you have in your organization. They allow you to produce rich interactions with users in your organization. Azure Bot Service has many key features, such as templates, flexible development and tools and services to make it easy to build bots for your applications.
If you have questions about interacting with bots or working with your data around bots, we can help with that. Click the link below to discuss this or anything Azure related with us.