Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Bots Everywhere!


As a kid, I used to wonder if I could make an intelligent clone of myself: which would look like me, sound like me and do all the work which I never enjoy doing or find boring to do. As I grew up and entered the professional space, "scheduling meetings" was one of them. Although Outlook was helpful to show the available times for everyone, I wished to not even have to switch my laptop ON, for this. I know I am sounding too lazy, but I am what I am :D.

At nsquared Solutions, the place where I work on amazing tech, and produce and develop awesome outcomes, I got an opportunity to turn my wish to reality: working on automating the "scheduling meetings", into a fun and interactive application. I am glad to mention that I used the Microsoft Bot Framework along with my C# skills, as I wanted the Bot to be up and running as soon as possible. Though, the Microsoft Bot Framework also works with Node.js. It supports a variety of platforms and can be hooked up with channels like Skype, Teams, Facebook, and Slack, to mention a few. Coupled with LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service), the Bot gets more power-packed as it binds the natural language and creates models which improve on usage.

Whenever I talk about Bots, I always think of Sci-fi movies with super complex and intelligent digital beings. When I started to work on the Bot, my expectation was for it to be intelligent and get even smarter over time. I expected it to deliver new experiences, removing barriers between people and technology. And I wanted it to help us make sense of the huge amount of data that is all around us, to deliver those better experiences. The success in adopting AI to solve real-world problems hinges on bringing a comprehensive set of AI services, tools and infrastructure to every developer, so they can deliver AI-powered apps of the future that offer unique, differentiated and personalised experiences. As a summary from my experience, I can say that it is simple for existing developers without deep AI expertise to start building such personalised data-driven app experiences of the future.

Tripti Wani

No comments: