A Microsoft Bot Framework & IBM Watson Bot sample

A sample bot using Microsoft Bot framework as communication channel support and IBM Watson Conversation

Introduction

The Microsoft Bot Framework provides just what you need to build and connect intelligent bots that interact naturally wherever your users are talking, from text/sms to Skype, Slack, Office 365 mail and other popular services. More details

IBM Watson Conversation service help you to quickly build and deploy chatbots and virtual agents across a variety of channels, including mobile devices, messaging platforms, and even robots. More details

Why using Microsoft Bot Framework & IBM Watson : Openess

• Watson Conversation is channel-agnostic. IBM provided native integration with Slack and integration with BotKit.
• Microsoft Bot Framework opens Watson to the Microsoft world via its integration with Skype, Bing, Cortana, Office365 Mail, Microsoft Teams...https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bot-framework/portal-configure-channels

Prerequisites

The minimum prerequisites to run this sample are:

• Create a Bluemix account & a Watson Conversation Workspace

  • In case, you don't have it : Sign up in Bluemix, or use an existing account $ Acquire Watson Conversation credentials

  • The code needs you to provide the username, password, and workspace_id of your Watson Conversation chat bot. If you have an existing Conversation service instance, follow these steps to get your credentials. If you do not have a Conversation service instance, follow these steps to get started.

• Latest Node.js with NPM. Download it from here.

• The [Cloud Foundry][cloud_foundry] command-line client

  Note: Ensure that you Cloud Foundry version is up to date
  

  Note: When pushing to cloud foundry you must explicitly specify what buildpack to use i.e. 
  
  cf push -b https://github.com/cloudfoundry/nodejs-buildpack
  

• The Bot Framework Emulator. To install the Bot Framework Emulator, download it from here. Please refer to this documentation article to know more about the Bot Framework Emulator.

• Register your bot with the Microsoft Bot Framework. Please refer to this for the instructions. Once you complete the registration, update your bot configuration with the registered config values (See Debugging locally using ngrok or Deploying to IBM Bluemix)

• Set up your Azure storage with the following steps.

  • Create an Azure account if you dod not already have one. This should be the account that you used for creating your bot
  • Create a CosmoDB database inside that account named botdocs
    
  • Inside that database, create a collection named botdata make sure that the partition key is id
  • Make a note of the PRIMARY KEY associated with your account. This must be stored in the environment file as storageKey
  • Take note of the URI associated with your bot account, It will be something like : https://<bot_name>.documents.azure.com:443/ - this will be the storageURL you will save in your environment file below.

Instructions

• Copy or rename the .env_example file to .env (nothing before the dot) and add your Watson conversations details and Microsoft Bot app keys.

# Environment variables
WORKSPACE_ID=
CONVERSATION_USERNAME=
CONVERSATION_PASSWORD=
#Microsoft Bot Info
appId=
appPassword=
storageKey=
storageURL=

• Before deploying that code, I recommend you fork it to test it locally with BotFramework emulator. more details

Code Explanation

Watson Conversation Node.js code : I retrieve the Bot session message, pass that message to Watson Conversation, retrieve the response and send back the response to Bot session.

var bot = new builder.UniversalBot(connector, function (session) {

    var payload = {
        workspace_id: workspace,
        context:'',
        input: { text: session.message.text}
    };

   // I use the Bot Conversation Id as identifier.
    var conversationContext = findOrCreateContext(session.message.address.conversation.id);	
    if (!conversationContext) conversationContext = {};
    payload.context = conversationContext.watsonContext;

    conversation.message(payload, function(err, response) {
     if (err) {
       session.send(err);
     } else {
       console.log(JSON.stringify(response, null, 2));
       session.send(response.output.text);
       conversationContext.watsonContext = response.context;
     }
    });

});

I have a specific function to handle the conversation context.

function findOrCreateContext (convId){
      // Let's see if we already have a session for the user convId
    if (!contexts)
        contexts = [];
        
    if (!contexts[convId]) {
        // No session found for user convId, let's create a new one
        //with Michelin concervsation workspace by default
        contexts[convId] = {workspaceId: workspace, watsonContext: {}};
        //console.log ("new session : " + convId);
    }
return contexts[convId];
}

Results

Channels supported by Bot Framework

My bot tested with Bot Framework test client

My conversation with Watson via Microsoft Skype

More Information

To get more information about how to get started, please review the following resources:

• IBM Bluemix
• Watson Developer Cloud
• Watson Conversation
• Microsoft Bot Builder for Node.js Reference
• Bot Framework FAQ