Waghmare - Introducing Azure Bot Service Building Bots for Business

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/978-1-4842-4887-4 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge.Proverbs 1:7 First of all, I offer honor and praise to my God, Lord Jesus Christ, who gives me opportunities to write books. I am grateful to my God, Lord Christ, and dedicate this book to Him and to His glory.

To my dearest parents, Mr. David Genu Waghmare and Mrs. Kamla Waghmare , for their eternal love, I thank them from the bottom of my heart for their care, encouragement, and motivation until this day. God bless you both. I thank my dearest sisters: Usha, Esther, Margret, Diana, Carol, and Mary . Especially, I appreciate the support of my sisters Carol and Mary in times of difficulty and pain. I thank my adorable nephews: Kris , who is passionate about fitness and has tremendous love for cats; and Savio , who appreciates a world of harmonium, tanpura, and classical music. I enjoy spending time with them. And, special thanks to my fianc Miss Priya Muniraj , for creating a positive impact by coming into my life!

I offer the following thanks as well to Miss Nisha Talwar , Engagement Manager at Capgemini, for her continuous support and encouragement; to Mr. Sreeprasad MK , Team Manager at Capgemini, for his care; and to Mr. Balkrishna Shirgaonker and Mrs. Reshma Kamath , Senior Consultants at Capgemini, who jointly shouldered my burden during my difficult days. To The Salvation Army Church ; Matunga Corps, Mumbai; and Amazing Grace Assembly of God Church, Bangalore; special thanks to all church members for your love and affection.

About the Author

Charles Waghmare

has been working at Capgemini since 2011 in various roles, such as Yammer community manager and global lead for the Enterprise Knowledge Management platform (known as KM3.0). In addition, he manages the development of Knowledge Management Portal built in SharePoint Online to host client references and knowledge assets related to artificial intelligence and customer experiences. Charles has been an active promoter of Microsoft Azure Chatbots to automate processes, develop engaging conversation with users, and create new use cases for Azure Chatbots.

Before joining Capgemini, Charles worked with ATOS (formerly SIEMENS Information Systems Ltd.) for five years. He was community manager of System Application Product-based communities at ATOS using Technoweb 2.0a Yammer-like platform. He was also responsible for managing the Communities of Practice initiative. In addition, Charles was a global rollout manager for a structured document management system built in SharePoint on-premise.

About the Technical Reviewer

Arun Sharma

leads the cloud business at Paytm Cloud as general manager of Enterprise Cloud. He has vast experience in cloud technologies (e.g., Microsoft Azure, AWS, GSuite), Internet of Things, machine learning, Micro services, bots, Docker, and containerization. He has almost 17 years of experience in a wide variety of roles, such as delivery manager at Microsoft, product manager at Icertis, lead and architect associate at Infosys, executive trainer at Aptech, and development consultant at CMC. He managed relationship, sales, cloud consumption, and consulting services; and adoption with medium and large global customers.

Arun loves challenges in the Microsoft playing field, combining them with his domain knowledge in banking, insurance, fast-moving consuming goods, local government, retail, and telecom. He is very active in the community as an author of international research papers, technical speaker, reviewer, blog writer, and LinkedIn sales navigator. He also holds the title of certified trainer from Microsoft and is completing his doctorate in business administration. Arun Sharma can found on Twitter at @arunkhoj .

In this introductory chapter, we take a simple, initial, and down-to-earth look at artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots. We examine Azure and Azure chatbots, and, last, study how to build chatbots using Azure chatbots. Readers with technical backgrounds and nontechnical backgrounds can gain an understanding of chatbots. In general, if you are fond of technology, passionate about digital transformation, and have a desire to bring about change, generate user engagement, and create high impact in terms of customer satisfaction, then this book is for you.