Skip to content
This repository has been archived by the owner on Jun 30, 2022. It is now read-only.

Broke Apart Experimental Skills and Updated What's New and Virtual As… #2637

Merged
merged 1 commit into from
Nov 1, 2019
Merged

Broke Apart Experimental Skills and Updated What's New and Virtual As… #2637

Show file tree
Hide file tree
Changes from all commits
Commits
Show all changes
1 commit
Select commit
File filter

Filter by extension

Filter by extension
Conversations
Failed to load comments.
Loading
Jump to
Jump to file
Failed to load files.
Loading
Diff view
Diff view
2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion docs/_docs/overview/virtual-assistant-skills-pattern.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
---
category: Overview
title: How do the Virtual Assistant and Skills work together?
title: How does Virtual Assistant and Skills work together?
description:As you develop your Virtual Assistant, you will find that the ability to manage individual domains of a conversation (Skills) and aggregate them into a singular *parent* Assistant becomes attractive for a number of reasons:
order: 5
toc: true
Expand Down
70 changes: 44 additions & 26 deletions docs/_docs/overview/virtual-assistant-solution.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
@@ -1,48 +1,31 @@
---
category: Overview
title: What is the Virtual Assistant Solution Accelerator?
title: What is Virtual Assistant?
order: 2
toc: true
---

# {{ page.title }}
{:.no_toc}
The Virtual Assistant Solution Accelerator is an open-sourced solution based on the [Microsoft Bot Framework](https://aka.ms/botframework) providing you with a set of core foundational capabilities and full ownership of a conversational assistant tailored to your brand, personalized to your users, and made available across a broad range of canvases and devices. Owning and enriching user relationships is vital to the goals of the Virtual Assistant Solution Accelerator. You can modify the name, voice, and personality to suit your brand's requirements and style guide.

At it's core is the [Virtual Assistant template]({{site.baseurl}}//overview/virtual-assistant-template) (available in C# and TypeScript), a project template with the best practices to developing a bot on the Microsoft Azure platform.

Extend a Virtual Assistant experience with reusable [Bot Framework Skills]({{site.baseurl}}/overview/skills), fulfilling common scenarios such as finding a nearby point of interest, checking off an item on a to-do list, or replying to an email. Skills can be fully customized and samples are available, enabling you to get started with multiple languages, dialogs, and code.

Review analytics captured from the out-of-the-box Application Insights telemetry using the [Virtual Assistant Analytics Power BI template]({{site.baseurl}}/virtual-assistant/tutorials/view-analytics/1-intro/).

![Virtual Assistant diagram]({{site.baseurl}}/assets/images/virtualassistant-diagram.jpg)

## Example scenarios

The Virtual Assistant Solution Accelerator can be applied to a variety of industry-specific scenarios. Sample Virtual Assistants are provided.
Customers and partners have increasing need to deliver advanced conversational assistant experiences tailored to their brand, personalized to their users, and made available across a broad range of canvases and devices. Continuing Microsoft's open-sourced approach towards the Bot Framework SDK, the open-source Virtual Assistant solution provides you with a set of core foundational capabilities and full control over the end user experience and data.

### Automotive
{:.no_toc}
At it's core is the [Virtual Assistant]({{site.baseurl}}//overview/virtual-assistant-template) (available in C# and TypeScript) is a project template with the best practices to developing a bot on the Microsoft Azure platform.

A voice-enabled Virtual Assistant integrated in a car providing passengers the ability to perform expected operations, like finding navigation or using the radio. Drivers can personalize this by linking to their preferences and enabling scenarios such as notifying someone they are running late, managing their tasks, or searching for ports of interest.
Common assistant scenarios are provided as reusable conversational Skills, increasing developer productivity and enabling a vibrant ecosystem of reusable scenarios. Individual skills can be added to an assistant, for example: finding a point of interest, checking off an item on a to-do list, or replying to an email. Skills are fully customizable and consist of language models for multiple languages, dialogs, and code.

### Hospitality
{:.no_toc}
Owning and enriching customer relationships and insights is vital to the goals of the Virtual Assistant. This contrasts with established in-market assistants that do not enable white-labelling, customization or privacy placed in control of the customer.

![Diagram of the Hospitality Assistant]({{site.baseurl}}/assets/images/hospitalitysample-diagram.png)
Further skills can be created and made available either through your own assistant or made available through a broader ecosystem enabling assistant owners to curate the capabilities that make sense for their scenario and work across industries.

A voice-enabled Virtual Assistant integrated in a hotel room can provide support for hospitality-focused scenarios such as room service, concierge, and local events. This can be further personalized by linking a guest to their preferences. This represnets An evolution of the current TV personalization experienced in room today.

For more information, view the [Hospitality Assistant sample]({{site.baseurl}}/virtual-assistant/samples/hospitality-assistant/).

### Enterprise
{:.no_toc}
Extend a Virtual Assistant experience with reusable [Bot Framework Skills]({{site.baseurl}}/overview/skills), fulfilling common scenarios such as finding a nearby point of interest, checking off an item on a to-do list, or replying to an email. Skills can be fully customized and samples are available, enabling you to get started with multiple languages, dialogs, and code.

A voice- and text-enabled Virtual Assistant integrated into enterprise devices and existing channels such as Microsoft Teams, Web Chat, and Slack. Enable employees to manage their calendars, find available meeting rooms, search for co-workers, or perform HR-related operations.
Review analytics captured from the out-of-the-box Application Insights telemetry using the [Virtual Assistant Analytics Power BI template]({{site.baseurl}}/virtual-assistant/tutorials/view-analytics/1-intro/).

For more information, view the [Enterprise Assistant sample]({{site.baseurl}}/virtual-assistant/samples/enterprise-assistant/).

## Principles
## Key Principles

### Your data, brand, and experience
{:.no_toc}
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -74,6 +57,41 @@ The Virtual Assistant Solution Accelerator architecture is flexible and can be i
A Virtual Assistant often needs to extend it's capabilities with specialized Skills. Typically, an organization needs to manage their own language models, dialogs, API integration, and generated responses.
This is further complicated should you require your Virtual Assistant to support multiple languages. The Solution Accelerator includes a Skill capability that enables external bots to be plugged into an existing Virtual Assistant.


## Virtual Assistant components

There are four major components within Virtual Assistant:

### Virtual Assistant Core
{:.no_toc}

The [Virtual Assistant Core]() is the basic building blocks that bring together the virtual assistant capabilities and the Microsoft technologies required to build a Virtual Assistant including Bot Framework SDK, LUIS, QnA Maker, Skills registration, Linked Accounts, etc.

### Skills
{:.no_toc}

Bot Framework Skills leverage the new Bot Framework SDK capabilities and provide re-usable conversational skill building-blocks covering conversational use-cases enabling you to add extensive functionality to a Bot within minutes. Skills include LUIS models, Dialogs and Integration code and delivered in source code form enabling you to customize and extend as required. Provided are Calendar, Email, To Do, Point of Interest skills and a number of other experimental skills. You can find more details in the [Skills]() section of this site.

### Assistant Solution Accelerators
{:.no_toc}

Microsoft has assembled these samples to allow for acceleration of customers in building a Virtual Assistant for specific Industries or scenarios. These samples have pre-packaged skill configurations, additional capabilities and suggested channels that are leveraged in typical scenarios.
- [Base Virtual Assistant]()
- [Automotive Assistant]() (In and out of Vehicle Experiences for Customers)
- [Enterprise Assistant]() (Employee Focused Experiences)
- [Hospitality Assistant]() (In Room Assistant for hotel guests)

### Clients and Channels
{:.no_toc}

Clients and Channels are the ways that users can interact with the Virtual Assistant.

Microsoft offers a variety of channels such as Facebook Messenger, Teams, Slack, WeChat, and many others. You can find many details around available channels in the [Bot Framework Channels documentation](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/bot-service-channels-reference?view=azure-bot-service-4.0).

Sample client applications are implementations of clients that will integrate seamlessly with your Assistant and enable Speech scenarios.
- [Virtual Assistant Client for Android]()
- Virtual Assistant Client for PowerApps *(Comming Soon)*

## Next steps
{:.toc}

Expand Down
48 changes: 12 additions & 36 deletions docs/_docs/overview/whats-new.md
View file
Open in desktop
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -12,45 +12,21 @@ toc: true

Customers and partners have increasing need to deliver advanced conversational assistant experiences tailored to their brand, personalized to their users, and made available across a broad range of canvases and devices. Continuing Microsoft's open-sourced approach towards the Bot Framework SDK, the open-source Virtual Assistant solution provides you with a set of core foundational capabilities and full control over the end user experience and data.

Owning and enriching customer relationships and insights is vital to the goals of the Virtual Assistant. You control the name, voice, and personality to suit your needs. The solution accelerator simplifies the creation of a Virtual Assistant, enabling you to get started in minutes and extend with a broad range of end-to-end development tooling.
At it's core is the [Virtual Assistant]({{site.baseurl}}//overview/virtual-assistant-template) (available in C# and TypeScript) is a project template with the best practices to developing a bot on the Microsoft Azure platform.

This contrasts with established in-market assistants that do not enable white-labelling, customization or privacy placed in control of the customer.

Common assistant scenarios are provided as reusable conversational Skills, increasing developer productivity and enabling a vibrant ecosystem of reusable scenarios. Individual skills can be added to an assistant, for example: finding a point of interest, checking off an item on a to-do list, or replying to an email. Skills are fully customizable and consist of language models for multiple languages, dialogs, and code.

Further skills can be created and made available either through your own assistant or made available through a broader ecosystem enabling assistant owners to curate the capabilities that make sense for their scenario and work across industries.
For more details on Virtual Assistant review [What is the Virtual Assistant Solution?]({{site.baseurl}}/overview/virtual-assistant-solution).

## Virtual Assistant components
{:.no_toc}

There are for major components within the Virtual Assistant:

### Virtual Assistant Core
{:.no_toc}

The Virtual Assistant Core is the basic building blocks that bring together the virtual assistant capabilities and the Microsoft technologies required to build a Virtual Assistant including Bot Framework SDK, LUIS, QnA Maker, Skills registration, Linked Accounts, etc.

### Skills
{:.no_toc}

Bot Framework Skills leverage the new Bot Framework SDK capabilities and provide re-usable conversational skill building-blocks covering conversational use-cases enabling you to add extensive functionality to a Bot within minutes. Skills include LUIS models, Dialogs and Integration code and delivered in source code form enabling you to customize and extend as required. At this time, we provide Calendar, Email, To Do, Point of Interest skills and a number of other experimental skills. You can find more details and the current list of skills [here]().

### Assistant Solution Accelerators
{:.no_toc}

Assistant Sample Implementation are implementations that Microsoft has assembled that allow for acceleration of customers to building a Virtual Assistant for specific Industries or scenarios. These samples have pre-packaged skill configurations, additional capabilities and suggested channels that are leveraged in typical scenarios. Currently these samples include:
- Base Virtual Assistant
- Automotive Assistant (In and out of Vehicle Experiences for Customers)
- Enterprise Assistant (Employee Focused Experiences)
- Hospitality Assistant (In Room Assistant for hotel guests)

### Clients and Channels
{:.no_toc}

Clients and Channels are the ways that users can interact with the Virtual Assistant. Microsoft offers a variety of channels such as Facebook Messenger, Teams, Slack, WeChat, and many others. You can find many details around available channels [here](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/bot-service-channels-reference?view=azure-bot-service-4.0).
There are four major components within the Virtual Assistant:

We also offer sample client applications which are implementations of clients that will integrate seamlessly with your Assistant and enable Speech scenarios. Currently, Microsoft offers client samples for both Android and PowerApps and custom clients can be built using Direct Line.
- Virtual Assistant Core
- Skills
- Assistant Solution Accelerators
- Clients and Channels

The following content will cover the new items of each of these components.

## What's new since Build 2019?
In this section, we will cover the new features to each of the Components of Virtual Assistant since the Build 2019 Conference. These new features are targeted for Ignite 2019 timeframe.
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -87,7 +63,7 @@ Microsoft has worked closely with the Microsoft Teams organization to incorporat
#### Multi-Turn QnA Maker Support
{:.no_toc}

Microsoft has added support to Virtual Assistant to allow for the support of Multi-Turn QnA Maker as a solution for more advanced FAQ experiences. Much of this comes with the support of [Bot Framework 4.6](https://github.com/microsoft/botframework#Bot-Framework-SDK-v4). More details around Multi-turn QnA Maker can be found [here](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/QnAMaker/how-to/multiturn-conversation).
Microsoft has added support to Virtual Assistant to allow for the support of Multi-Turn QnA Maker as a solution for more advanced FAQ experiences. Much of this comes with the support of [Bot Framework 4.6](https://github.com/microsoft/botframework#Bot-Framework-SDK-v4). More details you can review the [Multi-turn QnA Maker documentation](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/QnAMaker/how-to/multiturn-conversation).


### Skills
Expand All @@ -97,17 +73,17 @@ Microsoft continues to grow its skills library and enhance skills that are provi
#### Improved Conversation Flows and Capabilities
{:.no_toc}

Microsoft has also improved the conversations in many of the existing skills that were previously announced that allow for better customer experiences with skills such as Calendar, POI, and others. You can find more details on the other skills and download their latest versions [here]().
Microsoft has also improved the conversations in many of the existing skills that were previously announced that allow for better customer experiences with skills such as Calendar, POI, and others. You can find more details on the other skills and download their [latest versions]().

#### Hospitality Skill (Experimental)
{:.no_toc}

Microsoft has released a new experimental skill focused on Hospitality scenarios allowing for experiences such as managing reservations, check out, and amenity requests. More details on scenarios that this supports can be found [here]().
Microsoft has released a new experimental skill focused on Hospitality scenarios allowing for experiences such as managing reservations, check out, and amenity requests. You can find more details on scenarios that this supports in the [Hospitality Skill documentation]({{site.baseurl}}/skills/samples/hospitality).

#### Event Skill (Experimental)
{:.no_toc}

Microsoft has released a new experimental skill focused on finding events from the popular platform [Eventbrite](http://www.eventbrite.com/). More details on scenarios that this supports can be found [here]().
Microsoft has released a new experimental skill focused on finding events from the popular platform [Eventbrite](http://www.eventbrite.com/). More details on scenarios that this supports can be found in the [Event Skill documentation]().

#### IT Service Management (ITSM) Skill (Experimental)
{:.no_toc}
Expand Down
Loading