Abstract

I, For One, Welcome Our New Bot Overlords - An Intro to Microsoft's Bot Framework

Bots! They've been with us for a while and with the new frameworks from Google, Facebook and Microsoft it seems inevitable that they'll take over and rule the world... by ordering pizza from a chat window because somebody mentioned pepperoni! As developers, we may be humanity's last, best hope, of preventing this bleak future. Or will we enable it?

Ok, ok - the dystopian fantasy aside - bots are pretty darn cool and so are the frameworks around them. In this session I'll share some practical advice learned from digging into Microsoft's Bot Framework preview to create Conversational User Interfaces, or bots. We'll look at both architectural and user experience best practices around designing a conversational bot, and what tools the SDK gives us, and if we're feeling brave enough - unleash the bot onto the unsuspecting public!

Bio

Matthew Soucoup is a Xamarin MVP, a principal at Code Mill Technologies, and the founder of the Madison Mobile .Net Developers group. Matt loves sharing his passion for mobile development with fellow developers and he regularly speaks at user groups and conferences throughout the nation including Xamarin Evolve, That Conference, St Louis Days of .Net and CodeMash. He has over 15 years of development experience in a variety of areas including working with C# since 2005 and focusing on mobile development since 2012. Matt blogs at codemilltech.com and posts random thoughts on Twitter @codemillmatt. When not behind a computer screen, Matt gardens hot peppers, rides bikes and loves Wisconsin micro-brews and cheese.