The thought of creating a bot may sound like a daunting task to anyone without a technical background. I know as a developer when I was tasked with writing a Question and Answer bot for my Microsoft Ignite Session this year that I co-presented with Larry Jin on the Microsoft Teams 
Team I was apprehensive as to what all it would entail.
It turned out the process of creating a Question and Answer bot is extremely simple and requires no technical abilities whatsoever. In fact, after creating the bot it struck me that the Question and Answer bot is the ideal bot to replace your company’s FAQ. We all have them… Frequently Asked Questions. Have you ever found a FAQ usable though? It’s a lot of search and reading and unless you search for the exact right keyword then you may not even find what you are looking for.
With the QnA Maker you can create a knowledge base of Frequently Asked Questions and then create a bot so that when users ask questions, AI Cognitive services will attempt to determine the user’s intent and return the appropriate response. This means users don’t have to search for a topic or enter a super specific question. Plus, they can interact with the bot directly from Teams (or many other channels) and never have to leave the context of their current application.
I’m sold… it’s time that you modernize your company’s FAQ.
Anyway, below is a video for the entire process for creating a bot and setting up a knowledge base as well as deploying the bot in Microsoft Teams. There are only 2 pre-requisites for getting it all working:
- An Azure subscription and access to that subscription
- For testing purposes, you need side-loading enabled for Teams in your Office 365 tenant.
So, technically, you just have 1 prerequisite, the Azure subscription. I should point out at this point, that I’m not well versed in Azure pricing, depending on your choices there are subscription charges for creating the QnA Service and the Bot. So, be careful and double check any comments I make about the F0 pricing being free. Okay, now that I’ve C’d My A…. Just follow the video below and get started today!
Want to learn more about bots, Azure, and Microsoft Teams along with a plethora of other information? Join us next March 14-15 in Branson, MO for the North American Collaboration Summit.
