For the Monday, February 10th meetup we will welcome Corry Watson. Corry will be discussing building conversation bot applications in Azure. These are very popular and in-demand applications these days, so join us to get the scoop!

Please RSVP for the meetup so we can best plan for food and drinks!

Title: Who’s turn is it anyway?

Abstract: Bot Framework has seen some significant changes in the past few years that allows developers to build robust conversational flows that can be applied to a multitude of conversation outlets. In this talk we’ll dive into Bot Framework v4 specifically, peek under the hood of how everything comes together when it comes to building automated conversational flows. Our focus will be diving into some code as well as delving into the various Azure services/configurations that are needed to get a Bot running in Azure. We’ll cover controllers, adapters and dialog components. With building conversational flows, the ability to understand what the user interacting with the bot is trying to say is paramount to the bot’s success, enter LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service). We’ll take a look at how LUIS can be leveraged to help the Bot determine the intent of the user interacting with the Bot. We’ll also dive into Azure to see how the Bot’s are deployed and how multiple channels can be configured in order to interact with the Bot’s through various interfaces (Slack, Twilio, etc). Within Azure, we’ll discuss the other various services that can be leveraged while building out Bots (App Insights, Cosmos DB, Sentiment Analysis, etc). We’ll get hands on with code throughout this talk to demonstrate how bot’s are planned, configured, built and ultimately deployed.

Speaker Bio: My name is Corry Watson. I was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. I attended Bishop Ready High School on the west of Columbus (Westside Best Side!). I then attended The Ohio State University where I studied computer and Information Science. After college, I started my career as a developer working for Cardinal Solutions (Now Insight). From there I did my stint in the enterprise world, working for Nationwide Insurance for 6 years. Since then, I have made my way back home to Insight (formerly Cardinal) and am enjoying my time back! My wife Liz and I have been married for 4 years, we live in the UA/Hilliard area, just west of the Scioto River. We are expecting our first child this coming June, so if you hear any Dad jokes during the talk, just know that I am getting myself prepared for fatherhood.