Workshop scheduled at 8:30-11:30 in Room 2 (Swain)

It’s easier than ever to quickly create bots to do your bidding using Microsoft’s Bot Builder SDK and Microsoft Azure. In this session we’ll learn how to use natural language processing using LUIS, JavaScript and Node.js to create an interactive bot that we can deploy to Skype, Facebook Messenger, SMS, and more! Even better, we’ll take advantage of Azure Bot Service which provides a self-contained bot infrastructure that you can even hook up to GitHub. What are you waiting for? It’s time to bring about the singularity!

Takeaways: Attendees will walk away with some working knowledge of using Azure to host bots, how to use the Microsoft Bot Builder SDK with JavaScript to create a basic bot, use “natural language processing” with LUIS to respond to users, and see how bots get wired up to 3rd party services and can be interacted with in real-time.

Prerequisite: This workshop will require attendees to either have an existing Azure account or a willingness to sign up for the Free trial which will not incur additional out-of-pocket costs (you will get a $200 credit for 30 days). This should be done before attending preferably: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/.

To sign up for Azure, you must provide a credit card for verification and future billing. If you are an existing Azure customer, you can expect to pay less than $1 for the services we’ll use during the workshop (mainly Azure Storage) and they can be immediately deleted after the workshop is over.

Kamran Ayub

Kamran Ayub is a full-stack engineer living in Minneapolis, MN. He has been in the industry since 2006 in roles spanning front-end design to infrastructure support. He is well-versed in web technologies and loves to work with both JavaScript and .NET stacks. His passion for impeccable UX, clean code, maintainable software architecture, and his range of ability have allowed him to wear many different hats throughout his career. He loves speaking at conferences and teaching others through his Pluralsight courses. He is a core contributor on the Excalibur.js team, a hobbyist game developer, the creator of Keep Track of My Games, and a maintainer on several open source projects. Besides coding, Kamran is an avid gamer and loves to spend time with his family. You can keep up with him on https://kamranicus.com.

Follow @kamranayub on Twitter