What's new at Build 2019
Developers can compose conversational experiences by stitching together re-usable conversational capabilities, known as Skills. Within an Enterprise, this could be creating one parent bot bringing together multiple sub-bots owned by different teams, or more broadly leveraging common capabilities provided by other developers.
With the preview of Skills at Build, developers can create a new bot (from the Virtual Assistant template) and add/remove Skills with one command line operation incorporating all Dispatch and Configuration changes. Skills are themselves Bots, invoked remotely and a Skill developer template (.NET, TS) is available to facilitate creation of new Skills.
This release includes a preview of Calendar, Email and Task productivity skills, Point of Interest, and Automotive Skills, along with new experimental skills. Skills include LUIS models, Dialogs, and Integration code delivered in source code form so developers can customize and extend as required.
Our approach to ensuring customers and partners can quickly build high-quality conversational experiences based on the Bot Framework continues to evolve. Our Enterprise Template, released last year, brought together the required capabilities to provide a solid foundation of the best practices and services needed to create a high-quality conversational experience. This reduces customer effort by allowing them to focus on their own experience.
The Enterprise Template has been highly received by customers and partners. We're continuing to simplify and enhance it alongside the Bot Framework SDK and Tools Team. The Virtual Assistant, which built on the Enterprise template offers more assistant-focused experiences.
At Build, we are bringing the two together, thanks to strong feedback from our customers that both internal and external facing experiences require more complex, assistant-like conversational experiences. These are proving critical to digital transformation and customer/employee engagement.
The Enterprise Template is now the Virtual Assistant Template and introduces the following capabilities:
- C# template simplified and aligned to ASP.NET MVC pattern with Dependency Injection.
- Typescript Generator
- Solutions NuGet library to enable easy updating of the template core after a project is created. Works out-of-box with Skills, enabling you to use re-usable conversational capabilities or hand off specific tasks to child Bots within your organisation.
- Welcome and returning user Adaptive Cards
- Updated Conversational Telemetry and Power BI Analytics
- ARM based automated Azure deployment, including all dependent services
At the same time, the Skills capability incubated as part of the Virtual Assistant and has been enhanced and made available more broadly as a Bot Framework capability covered in the previous section. This then enables us to focus on more scenario and industry focused solutions that extend this base Virtual Assistant.
Developers who have already made use of the Enterprise Template and want to use the new capabilities can follow these steps to get started quickly.