 So our next speaker is a great lucky lady in front of me right now, Alisa. She's been working with bots since the early days of Microsoft Bot Frameworks release and she's a world finalist in Microsoft image card which has published, and she has published multiple bots publicly today and so currently she's working as a type of evangelist, evangelist with Microsoft and she's here to go to show you about the future and applications of chatbots and how to implement it in the Microsoft Bot Framework. Let's put our hands together and welcome Alisa. Today I'm a technical evangelist with Microsoft. Let's answer the hello of anyone who's a student. Just tweet me any questions if you have any. So I just want to get a feel of the crowd. How many of you have a technical background? Okay, how many of you have actually heard me talk before? Okay, that's good. So it won't be a repeat for everyone. Cool. So it's a fact that we want instant interaction. So if we want to maybe make a doctor appointment or book a restaurant, we want it done immediately. We're getting more education and if a website has really bad UI, we're not going to stick around and try to figure out a way. So for businesses to engage customers, which is us, they need to provide us the fastest way to get something done, a way that is easily accessible in the US or mobile, and then lastly a way that's natural for us to talk to and get things done. So the way that a lot of businesses do this right now is using apps. Now almost every business out there has an app. If you think about it, it's like H&M, Domino's Pizza, Subway, and they all help us do stuff like maybe collect loyalty points or give feedback like the McDonald's one app. But can one person have every app? So how many people here have 20 to 30 apps? So to give you an idea, 20 apps is about one page. 30 to 40? 40 to 50? Okay, the user has 26 apps. And if you think about it in the western countries and Asian countries, it's about 30 to 40. And so the thing is that the majority of people's time, so 84% of people's time, is actually spent only just using five apps that they can store from the app store. So if you think about it, there's like a select few apps that you usually use more like maybe Spotify or maybe Messenger. So if people aren't spending their time on these apps anymore, where are they going to? And the answer is to messaging apps. And I think it's a whole truth for a lot of us that we're spending more time with WhatsApp than looking through our Facebook news feed. So there are these different ones like Messenger, Telegram, Viber and things like that. And in fact, there are three billion monthly active users on the big four messaging apps which is WeChat, WhatsApp, Viber and Facebook Messenger. So imagine if businesses had the ability to sort of go on these platforms and engage with more people. Like imagine how much more reach they would have. And the thing is that now they can with bots. And bots are basically machines that we speak to to get sucked down. So the simplest instance of bots are these three things. So I'm sure you guys recognize some of these. There's Siri, Cortana and Google Now. And they help us get things done. So chat platforms that already have bots are some of these ones that recently released their bot platforms. In terms of bots out there right now, what's the usage like? This is kind of my personal opinion on the industries where bots will actually take off. So service, you can now order burgers through the Burger King app. I'm not sure if it's only in American at the moment, but yeah. And then celebrities, red full from LMFAO actually has an official bot you can talk to. And then there's finance. Using the American Express bot, you can see what you've been spending on and things like that. And then healthcare, you can ask like the vital healthcare bot what kind of symptoms you had and you'll tell you maybe what you're suffering from. And lastly, legal. So do not pay is an app that has help with 160,000 parking tickets in the UK. And we talk to it, we tell it, your problem, like maybe the Burger King, Wadden, Dylan, etc. And then it basically writes you a whole letter that you send back to the council and then it helps you wake it. Or like it gives you a chance to wake it. So that's pretty cool. But the price for the most mature bot ecosystem actually goes to WeChat. And WeChat is something that's mostly used in China. WeChat bots have like all sorts of different ways of interacting in the bot. So it's not just being able to talk to the bot, but it's also, the bot can also show you interfaces like these to make your experience even better. And I'm going to show you a video of what it looks like when bots are very dominant. WeChat is an example of, for lack of a better word, a super app. It's a Swiss army night that basically does everything for you. It's your WhatsApp, Facebook, Skype and Uber. It's your Amazon, Instagram, Venmo and Tinder. But it's other things you don't even have apps for. There are hospitals that have built out whole equipment booking systems. There are investment services. There are even heat maps that show how crowded a place is. Being your favorite shopping mall for a popular tourist site. The list of services goes on basically forever. But it's not the variety of things you do on WeChat that makes it so powerful. It's the fact that they're all in one app. So why does that matter? Imagine you're sitting at home and one day you notice your corki's dirty. You open WeChat, hit a few buttons and a few hours later a man shows up at your door with some shampoo and a big vacuum. Your dog gets cleaned in English. You take a photo, you share it with your friends and pack dog feed in business. You haven't left the app. Your friend who likes Hello Kitty and works a boring office job is slacking off at work and booking a WeChat. Then she sees the photo of your clean corki. She decides she wants her food away. She clicks the tag on your photo and orders the same service. Within seconds the man with the big vacuum is on his way to her house. She pays him and he's happy because he got paid instantly on WeChat. She starts chatting with you to thank you. Neither of you have left the app. While chatting she tells you about a new hit from you. She says you have to come. It's a slap that you accept. She orders food while still at her desk. You order a taxi. She pays for the food. On the way to her house the man with the big vacuum invests the money he earned from both of you into a wealth management product that's probably a little too risky. Neither of you nor the man with the big vacuum have left the app. The first few arrive and the app tells the kitchen you're dead. You reach out to her while the photo pops up in the room. It's no photo from the year you got that weird partner in your hair. Of course she makes a comment. You're food is served. You notice your meat is a bit overcooked so you sample photo of the person who's disparaging the restaurant with you. You're already on your phone and you remember you still owe your friend money because she paid to transfer our money. Neither of you, the man with the big vacuum nor the restaurant have left the app. At the restaurant there are no menus. There are no waiters. There is no cashier. There is only WeChat. Yeah so that's pretty amazing isn't it? Yeah I always think it's amazing every time I see this video. So that's how it looks like when businesses are able to get their jobs onto these conversational platforms. And now I'm going to do two demos. So who's got a size scanner here? Okay cool. So quite a few of you. A size scanner is a service that lets you look for cheap flights. So I'll just show you if I go. What's the date today? I can't see why. So as you can see it basically took out my intent and entities so it knows that I'm flying from, just from analyzing my natural language it knows that I'm flying from Auckland to, sorry from Singapore to Auckland, December 9th and coming back December 15th. So it's just going to go and look for any flights for me. Let's show you. So this board is an official board by size scanner which is pretty cool. And as you can see it gives me some options whether I want cheaper flights or faster flights. And I hate stopovers. So let's show the top five shorter flights. And then it shows me like a bunch of different flights that are shorter. And then I can just go ahead and book or set price alerts to alert me whenever there's price increase on the flights. So that's one example of a travel agent service kind of board. And the second board that I'm going to show you is one that I built so it's a bit of a shameless part of my mind. Oh no, last time you messaged me. What did you say? All you've got left. QR apps. Okay. Oh you speak chat. Oh you speak chat? No. Okay. So sometimes there's QR codes but then you don't have a QR app and it's really annoying because you don't actually know what it says. So I built this board that you can send the QR code to and it will tell you what the link is. And I'm just going to send it a photo from my phone. I'm just looking for a QR photo in my phone. There should be one. All right, found it. Okay, so I basically just sent it from my phone. So as you can see, it's going to moment analyze your image and then it gives me back the link from the app. So with that, I can now delete that QR app that is just taking extra space. Okay, guess what these two boards will be using? Yes? Microsoft board for everyone. Oh yes. Surprised at that. So here you need to build intelligent boards to interact with your users. So that's like a pizza board kind of use case where you order pizzas through the board. Now the board framework has three main components. So the first is board delay SDKs. So for you techies out there, you can build it using Node.js or C sharp. But if your main language isn't those two languages, you can also use other languages and then use an API to interface with the board connector. So the second component is about connector and it allows you to write your board once and then connect it to all sorts of different channels. So not just Facebook, but also Skype, Telegram, Slack, whatever you want. And lastly, the board directory which is like your app store for boards. So the board builder lets you build powerful conversations. And it's basically based on dialogues which are building blocks to build a conversation. And there's various dialogue types. So like prompts, form flow and NLP. And I'll just show you some examples of that. So this one is about when you can get news and if I say get top news. It's going to come back and ask... I'm on free tier web app because I'm cheek skates. Takes a while to wake up. Okay, I'll ask you which category you would like. So I can go and pick technology. So this is an example of a prompt dialogue. And then as you can see, it gives me all the top news and technology today. And I can let you click on the button and say give me a short snippet of the news and then it gives me a short snippet that I can read from. So there's many different ways of interacting with it. And the form flow board is basically like back and forth conversation. So this is a restaurant booking board and if I say make me a booking for tomorrow. And these boards are also built using Microsoft Word framework. It asks me, I need some details. So it knows that I'm making the booking for tomorrow and it asks me what's my preferred time. So I'll say it's 6pm, the name. It's almost like filling out a form but in a more conversational way so you don't have to like ring in and it will just come in. So it basically just goes back and forth like that. And lastly, NLP dialogs is like what I've just showed just now. So using natural language processing to talk to the users. And Microsoft has a NLP tool called NUES as well that helps you do natural language processing. Yup, so I said earlier, if you don't really use C sharp or Node.js you can always use these other languages to use the board. Okay, so secondly, the board connector that lets you write once and run everywhere. So these are all the different channels that you can connect your board to. So you can even put it on your own website once you've written it. It's not just limited to Facebook Messenger. I think Skype Teams is in there as well but it doesn't show up there. So I'll show you the dashboard. So this is the dashboard where I manage everything to do with my board and I can sort of choose what channels what kind of channels I want it on. So I currently have it on Telegram Skype Facebook Messenger and I can see the issues that it has and try chatting with it over here just to test it. Yup, so that's board management. And then lastly the board directory. So this is the board directory and as you can see these are all the boards that I can... It's like a search engine for boards basically. So if I look into this one Yup, so it's built easily for free work and it has a Skype channel and I can just add to Skype and start talking to it. So if you look at another one, maybe main board because it doesn't have names it has it on all these channels and I can start talking to it for any of them. So I'm going to do a demo actually I was going to use Louis since five minutes he is with the demo. So this Louis tool is actually just the NLP part of the board. So if I go to new application and I'll name it I'll just recreate the rest of the board. Okay so this is like the Microsoft version of with AI so if I add intents here and say makebooking and example after this can be so makebooking and then submit it. Entities I can also add and I'll call this... oh wait sorry there's like preview entities so if I look for the date time entity it will automatically detect whenever I write date times in my address so I'll need to train it. So the train button is like this small one in the bottom left and then if I say so it can automatically detect like a date time within what I just said because there's really like preview entities and I'll submit that as well. Now one thing you've got to be careful of is that you need to tell the board what is not correct as well so if I say the sky is none so I'm telling the board that the sky is blue doesn't mean anything to it so if I say ha ha ha I need to tell you that doesn't mean anything unlike your bed. And then if I go to this thing called fresh list features down the bottom left I can name this feature okay and then I can type in all the synonyms to do with booking so booking, appointment what else is there reservation we are reservation can meet table should I go save so if anyone says anything like table oh wait I was going to choose this yeah so if anyone says something like table for 5 it notes that it's under make booking so these are just ways to help train your board as well yeah okay so in terms of where to get started I recommend you should go to the docs.boardframer.com and that is basically gives you like a step by step construction on how to get started with the Microsoft board framework it's not as hard as you think it is to be honest it's actually quite easy to get started and set up your board this is one of my favourite places for resources to do with board framework and then lastly I recommend that you join the SG boards facebook group it's like a community of board enthusiasts in Singapore I think you can type sgbords.com and it should take you to the facebook group so you can put any questions that you want on there and just go for it okay and that's pretty much all I have do you guys have any questions yeah oh yeah sure this one yes okay at least I can have a question so for the Microsoft board framework is it free for you or do you have to pay for using the system so there's like a free cure actually no the board framework itself is free isn't it we use and then in terms of the natural language understanding one I think it's 10,000 free calls a month and then you have to pay after that I'm not sure about the payment payment model is for the other natural language those are but the board framework itself is free to use yeah it's just the natural language engine that is expensive we're not expensive but like with you yeah good question how many languages does it use? oh seven languages at the moment but what you can do is if you are doing an unsupported language right we do you use a translated API to translate it into a supported language and then put it through RUIS it has to be a unique program it has to be a unique language or any language to be translated sorry so for example it's Arabic oh Arabic so you use a translated API to translate it from Arabic to like something that Louis supports maybe like English yeah and then you put it through RUIS and it doesn't have to translate it perfectly as long as it roughly gets it like um I'm working RUIS will understand it no thank you cool yeah I think it's got that language style oh yes definitely yeah thank you so much for yourself for this introduction to Microsoft but pretty well we'll have a short Q&A session at the end of the session and then we'll have their three speakers here for you to question that