>> Hello and welcome
to another episode of This Week in Cognitive.
I'm your host Noelle LaCharite and
it is my pleasure to bring to you the latest
and greatest applications and demos and
samples that we are building
inside of Cognitive Services.
So, I always like to remind you of all the amazing,
incredible things that you can do with
the pre-built models in
Cognitive Services and in applied AI.
Everything from vision to language, speech,
and actually today, we're going to focus on knowledge.
So, we're going to go dive into QnA Maker.
We recently announced a brand new feature,
the ability to add personality
to your Frequently Asked Questions chat bot.
It's the way to build a chat bot in just a few minutes,
but now, it even has personality.
So, let's jump right in. So, here you can
see the QnA Maker page.
You could just go on out.
You do need a subscription,
so you'd go into the Azure portal,
create a subscription in order to be able to use this.
I'm going to just show you the page
that you'll start on, then you'll have to sign in.
That takes a couple seconds.
So, I've already signed in,
just to show you a little bit about how this works.
Now again, almost every company has this challenge.
How do I solve the problem of
people in the organization having to
answer the exact same question
over and over and over again?
The people who are answering
those questions don't like answering them,
and the people who can build something,
or as a developer,
I'm excited to be able to
offer something that someone might
value within the company and
that would be great for the business.
So, here's a really quick and
easy opportunity to do that.
So here, I've gone into QnA Maker.
You'll notice there's a nice menu at the top.
You can see existing knowledge bases that you have,
but I'm going to actually create one from scratch.
So, we'll go in,
create a new knowledge base.
Right here is where you would go in
and create the Azure subscription.
QnA service today is about $10 a month.
So really, and that's in production.
There's definitely a free tier,
so you can get started right away in
playing around with this.
Now, I'm going to go in and create
using my existing account.
I'm going to go in and select a subscription account.
I went in and created a couple of these and
now I'm going to name my knowledge base.
Now, in this case, I can actually go to any FAQ sites.
But I'm going to choose one, well, that's applicable.
In this case, I'm going to choose
QnA Maker since we're learning about it.
I also found one really interesting design practice
is that you could go in
and instead of using the word "bot" in your name,
you might want to try the word "assist"
or "helper" or something different than "bot".
For whatever any reason or
the most important reason you would want to do
that is because you want to show value,
that this thing is going to help you out and
"bot" doesn't intuitively say that.
So, QnA Maker assist assistant,
calling your bot James,
though awesome, probably doesn't indicate its usefulness.
So, definitely go in, choose a name,
and choose some describing words
in the name of your bot to
identify what it's gonna do for the user.
The next thing I need to do is find out
where my content is going to come from.
So, I actually went and pulled up the site for QnA Maker.
It turns out the QnA Maker has an FAQ, lucky me.
I'm going to then copy it and paste it.
Now, notice here, I can actually add multiple urls.
Let's say I had FAQs across
my organization that I wanted to pull into a single bot.
Let's say, I add other services,
and provided this content,
I could load them all here.
I can also load TSV files.
I recently worked on a project
where a hospital wanted to create an assistant
and they handed me an Excel spreadsheet of
every question and every
answer that they've collected so far,
hundreds and hundreds of them.
So, you can also load that content as well.
Now here is the new feature, the chit-chat feature.
So now, you can add a personality.
This is extremely unique,
it gives you the ability to not just create
a bot with language understanding,
but now add a whole bunch of
personality features that you can customize.
The reason this is important
is because one of the things that will
determine your success is
how well it communicates to the user,
does it communicate your brand?
You're going to have a
different personality for your bot.
If you are a record label versus if you are
a legal office versus a doctor's office or a school,
there are different ways that you
want to sound to your user.
So, in my case,
I like the friend because I'm a friendly person.
So, I'm going to pick that one, but you
could pick any of them to play around with.
I honestly would pick all three,
so you could see the different options.
Then I say create your knowledge base.
So, what was happening there is that I went to the site,
it pulled out all the questions and
answers into a dialogue.
This is a tough thing to be able to do right technically,
be able to build a language understanding model
from a web page.
It did that for you in just a couple, maybe a minute.
It then allows you to go in and edit it.
So, one of the common questions
I have with developers that are
building bots using this technology is,
"Well, what happens when I ask it
a question and it
doesn't come back with the answer I thought?"
Well, the good news is this is a model you can edit.
So, let's just take a look.
You can actually see right here,
there's the ability to test it.
So, I can click test and it
allow me to go through and test it.
Before I do that though, I'm
going to actually save and train
the model based on what was built and then you'll notice,
this is AI, it's a research and experiment project.
So, what you're going to do is every time you
start to make changes to tune
and improve your language model
that's supporting this bot,
you're going to go in and save and train
that model in order to be able to test against it.
So, I'm going to go ahead and right now,
be able to type in,
like let's say over here,
it says, "What is the roadmap?"
So, what you'll see here,
what happened was is that I was able
to type in what's the roadmap.
Notice that's not actually what's in the FAQ.
What's in the FAQ is what is
the roadmap of the QnA Maker.
But I don't want to have to type that in,
I want to accommodate my users using
the language my users would use.
So, this allows me to not have to do any of that work.
As a developer, all I have to do is point it to an FAQ,
pull in the FAQ and then be able to ask it questions.
Now, your job is to test, test, test, test.
I usually have,
user experience is a huge part of bot creation.
So now, you need to have users who would
typically use this bot, start using it.
Collect all the different ways they
might say something and make sure,
you'll notice over here,
I'm going to go ahead and close this out.
Over here, there's a little plus sign.
You can add additional utterances that
will render the same response.
So, this is your ability to fine tune and create
a better model that will
accommodate your users in how they talk.
Now, let's take a look at
the chit-chat feature because that's pretty fun.
So, if I just say something like,
"Hello", you can see if someone says,
"Testing, can you hear me?"
Or "Hiya, good morning" or "Hello Google",
"Theory", "Cortana", no matter what they say,
you can see the answer provided here.
Now, if you have a personality of your bot,
what you're going to want to do is change these answers.
If you have a quirky,
fun bot, maybe you'd make a funny answer.
If you have a more cartoon,
kids bot, maybe you'd say,
"Have a magical day" or something like that.
This gives you the ability to change the responses,
which then changes the personality and
how users interact with your bot.
Other ones I think I remember seeing in
here was something about ice cream, maybe not.
Oh, sneeze. Let's try that one.
What if somebody asks your bot, "Do you dream?"
"Do you smell?"
"Can you sneeze?"
You should have an answer for these things.
This is what makes a bot fun and personable,
and the reality is when people test out your bot,
especially in the beginning,
they're going to test it with all sorts of
quirky personality type questions.
So, be ready for them.
Now, you can do it with a click of a button to select
that radio button when you're
building your QnA Maker instance.
So, as you can see here,
within just a couple seconds,
I'm able to build a bot,
point it to an FAQ,
create a language model,
and even add personality.
So, thanks for joining us on This Week in
Cognitive and I look forward to seeing you next time.