Many organizations are looking to provide conversational experiences across a range of conversational canvases for their employees, across all industries and countries, especially with the increase of remote working during the pandemic. To help customers accelerate building such enterprise assistants, with a high-quality conversational experience, we are announcing the Enterprise Assistant Bot Template in Bot Framework Composer as part of Microsoft Conversational AI’s release at Microsoft Build Conference this week.
This template provides a starting point for those interested in creating a virtual assistant for common enterprise scenarios. It demonstrates a common bot building architecture and high-quality pre-built conversational experiences through a root bot connected to multiple skills. This pattern allows for the consolidation of multiple bots across the organization into a centralized solution where a root bot finds the correct bot to handle a query, accelerating user productivity. With Bot Framework Composer, a powerful visual authoring tool for building bots and virtual assistants, you have the flexibility to personalize the assistant to reflect the values, brand, and tone of your company and extend with code where needed.
The template is designed to be ready out-of-the-box with support for common employee channels such as Microsoft Teams and Web Chat. It includes features from Core Assistant Bot Template that is newly released in Bot Framework Composer and two pre-built skills (Enterprise Calendar Bot and Enterprise People Bot), with more to come. Here is an overview of the scenarios included in the Enterprise Assistant Bot Template:
You can learn more about the Enterprise Assistant Bot Template here including its targeted conversational experiences, design principles, example interactions, developer experience, data usage and storage. We have also created a Tutorial to help you get started.
All of these investments were informed by the popularity of our Virtual Assistant solution accelerator along with traction around Bot Framework Composer. This led us to infuse all of the Virtual Assistant capabilities into Composer and the Bot Framework SDK enabling these capabilities to be leveraged far more broadly and benefit from new tooling.
Here is a preview of an Enterprise Assistant in Microsoft Teams leveraging this template:
Conversational User Experience Guide
The Enterprise Assistant Bot Template was designed based on the thoughtful Conversational User Experience (CUX) best practices we have learned based on years of experiences building and deploying CUX worldwide for a variety of bots and virtual assistants. You can check out our newly updated CUX Guide here. The guide offers insights to help you craft an effective, responsive, inclusive, and delightful experience that tackles a variety of business scenarios.
Share your scenario and feedback
We would love to hear your scenarios and feedback using this template and CUX guide, including additional pre-built skills and capabilities you would like to see included in the future. Please submit a feature request with your detailed enterprise scenario for future consideration.
Sign up for 1:1 Consultation
As part of the Microsoft Build Conference (May 25-27) this week, we are offering free 1:1 customer consultation sessions with experts in our Microsoft Conversational AI product engineering team. After you register for the conference, you can sign up for these consultations here, choose Azure Conversational AI, and let us know more about your scenarios and challenges. If you have additional questions about Enterprise Assistant Bot Template or any other Conversational AI questions, we would be happy to help you there.