Empowering Developers with Azure Bot Framework Composer for Seamless Creation, Testing, and Deployment

Introduction

Azure tool that can help speed up chatbot creation is Azure bot framework composer. Since you build your dialogues in UI, There is no struggle anymore to visualize your dialogues. This tool is great if you don’t want to write a lot of code. Now we will look into what Azure bot framework composer is.

Azure Bot Framework Composer

There are two versions available composer v1.x and composer v2.x. This can be built and hosted on the cloud or available as a desktop application. Using this, conversational experiences with bots can be created visually.

What can be done using Azure Bot Framework Composer?

• Using the template, we can create a Bot.
• Add natural language understanding capabilities to a Bot.
• Create bots in multiple languages.
• Directly we can test using web chat.
• Can publish Azure services like Azure app service and Azure functions.

Concepts of Azure Bot Framework Composer

1. Dialog: Dialog contains instructions for a bot to react to inputs. A simple bot can have only a few dialogs, but a complex one can have hundreds. Composer lets you create dialogs visually with no need to write code so that you can focus on the conversational flow rather than the mechanics of the dialog. There are 2 types of dialogs, one is the main dialog, and the other is the child dialog. Using composer, we can call child dialog using main dialog or vice versa.

Features of dialog:

• Recognizers: These recognizers interpret the users wants from the input and extract entity values and intent. These entity and intent values are passed to the trigger. The recognizer isn’t always called when the dialog is invoked.

2. Triggers: Triggers are event handlers for dialog in the Azure Bot Framework Composer. There can be one or more triggers for one dialog. Triggers have actions which are set of instructions to be executed when there is an event with a trigger comes. Once a trigger handles a given event, no other action will happen. If not, then this is passed to the child dialog. If it is not handled by it, then it will pass to the parent dialog. This will repeat until it is handled or reaches the bot’s main dialog. The trigger contains the name, action, and the condition.

Types of triggers:

• Intent recognized.
• Duplicated triggers recognized.
• Unknown intent.

Difference between Azure Bot Framework Composer and Bot Framework SDK

• Azure Bot Framework Composer is a visual designer and a tool to create chatbots in Azure bot service.
• Developers use Azure Bot Framework SDK to write code to create chatbots within the Azure bot service.
• Azure Bot Framework SDK is meant for use with teams.
• Azure Bot Framework Composer is not meant to work in teams.
• Anything is possible with Azure Bot Framework SDK; you can write your integrations.
• Azure Bot Framework Composer is easy to use, but it is limited.
• Debugging is easier with Azure Bot Framework SDK; we can run line by line and know what is wrong.
• Azure Bot Framework Composer and Azure Bot Framework SDK are version control.

Advantages of developing Bots with Azure Bot Framework Composer

• Authoring dialogs using the visual canvas is easier to create a conversational flow rather than code and integrate with the system.
• Design conversational experience with the blend of both visuals and code.
• A composer-based bot can use existing dialogs authored in code.
• Ability to create more natural and personalized responses with engaging conversational experiences using language generation.
• Integrated testing within composer authoring experience.

Conclusion

Azure Bot Framework Composer is open source, easy to use, and has no low code. Conversational Bots can be created visually in multiple languages. It has version control, and the latest version of this Azure Bot Framework Composer is Composer v2.x. It has a very flexible UI. It is one of the easy and simple ways to create a chatbot.

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