[MUSIC]
>> As someone who has the privilege of
working alongside customers every day,
I know that the customer experience
is always top of mind.
Here to tell us how conversational AI can
improve that experience is Lili Cheng.
Hello, Lili. Hi, thank you for being with us.
>> Hi, it's great to be here. Thanks.
>> I'm so excited.
It was really educational for
me to prepare for this interview.
There's so much exciting stuff
happening in conversational AI.
But tell us a little bit about
how you ended up in this space,
in your journey to working in conversational AI?
>> Well, I think for me,
I think you know this, but I'm
half Japanese and half Chinese.
But I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska.
My husband is half Israeli and half French.
In our family, just everyday life,
language and just being able for
everyone to communicate is really,
I think is at the heart of every family.
I also have teenagers.
So just speaking English to
them and understanding what they're
talking about sometimes, English
can almost be like another language.
So language and conversation,
it's just part of me, I think.
>> That's so important.
I've been a Solution Architect for
a long time and a part-time developer.
But even for me,
I didn't think about
conversation in my solutions until very
recently when I was actually watching my husband talk
to all of these devices in our house in his phone.
I'm like, "He talks to everything and I often don't."
Haven't we seen a huge change in that over the course of
the last 15 months and with us
all being impacted by the pandemic?
>> Absolutely. We had this dream or this idea early
on that people spend so much time
online and so much time in their conversation apps.
We wanted just to bring all the things that you do
right there into your conversation
and the way you're sharing.
I think the way we're seeing students use Teams
or people just meeting and living online,
this year has been a huge year for us.
>> Yeah. So much change has
happened in such a compressed period of time.
I know that that's been something for us all deal with.
We're here at Microsoft Build
and we're talking to developers.
Developers want to put
these tools and these experiences
in their applications.
But how are we making that easy for them?
What are we doing for them?
>> We're really seeing two types of things really,
bread and depth use of conversational AI.
So for example, for depth,
one of the things that's super cool that
we have is we use Teams a lot and
we've made that back-end of Teams, that
telephony, available for developers.
So the same thing we use in Teams is available in Azure.
One of the things that we're seeing developers
say is, hey,
we want to be able to automate
conversational AI and intelligence like we're doing.
Then we want to be able to hand off to a person
and have them talk through telephony.
Just a couple of weeks ago,
we had our first production customer
in Montgomery County,
Maryland, came to us and said,
"Hey, we know you're still in preview.
But we need to be able
to have our citizens be able to call
in and schedule their COVID vaccines.
Not everybody can use the web,
and just being able to call is so important."
They use our combined tools to automate
the calling of people
and then they hand off to a person as needed.
Right out of the gate,
I think we had like 10,000
people calling every single day using
a combination of Bot Framework
and the Azure Communication Service.
To do that, we added
a telephony channel in Bot Framework.
So we're just really excited that we're
seeing people do these deeper engagements.
Then the other really cool thing that we did
is we worked with ZAMA,
who's a solution integrator.
They actually helped Montgomery County build a solution.
They used all of our open-source tools.
We just, I think yesterday released
the new Bot Framework Composer,
which is extensible and embeddable,
and it's all on GitHub, so it's open-source
and ZAMA embedded their tools into their solution.
So that solution provider can
really provide solutions to Montgomery County,
but to lots of other organizations.
>> That's just such a fantastic story.
It's a real-world example, which I think is really
helpful of where we're going with this technology,
but also for me, inclusion.
The idea that, no, not everyone can use the web,
and providing this additional channel with the tools.
Plus, I'm a huge fan of GitHub.
I love how we're embracing open-source.
I think that that is fantastic across the ecosystem.
So I love that.
I feel like you're really
focusing on trying to make things
simpler so that our developers
can build once and use in many places.
Am I getting that right?
>> Yeah, you are totally right.
Just for the Health Bot,
I think 3,000 organizations
were able to really quickly roll that out.
One of the things I think that
we're hearing from developers
is it's really great
that we can build these conversational experiences,
but we want to be able to
put our experiences in a lot of places.
We might want to extend search and
have our functionality just appear as a search answer.
Or we might want to extend,
not just in a chat experience,
but be able to extend that experience
into Outlook or an e-mail.
One of the things that we've done
is for those of you who are familiar with Bot Framework,
we use a technology called Adaptive Cards,
which lets you author the UI
once, and then it adapts to the host
app so you can build it once
and it can appear in Skype or
Teams or Slack or in your app.
We use that exact same technology
to enable not just building a team spot,
but the Teams tab or an Outlook extension and search.
So if you build this once,
you can reuse that UI and just have it appear in
many different experiences as
well as your own app or your webpage.
So I think we're really simplifying
that experience for developers.
I'm excited and you'll hear a lot more about that from
the Teams team and Outlook and throughout Build.
Then another way that we're really getting breadth, which
really, it's been a longtime passion
of mine to make sure that
everybody can create experiences.
We're really addressing people who don't code.
You don't need to code at all, or maybe you want to just
code a little bit through the Power suite.
So we have the Power Virtual Agents.
So people who don't code can
begin really quickly, author an experience,
and then if they want to, they
can either work with the developer or extend it
themselves with all the full power
of the Bot Framework on Azure.
So I think that breadth,
being able to leverage your experience in lots
of ways and then also have
all different types of people be able to
author these experiences is really exciting for us.
>> It's exciting for me too.
I think this is a fantastic topic.
Adaptive Cards, so powerful, and
those Power Virtual Agents. Because there's lots of
different types of developers out in the world.
I love how we're building that
into our strategy and to hear
you really embracing that and the thinking
of this important work you do, makes me really happy.
I'm one of those people that codes part-time,
not all the time, and love
the Power Virtual Agents and being able to come in,
in that low code, no code way
and still get great business impact.
So it's just really exciting.
Thank you so much for being with us, Lili.
>> Sure. Really exciting and I hope everybody
checks out the stuff and has
a great Build. Thanks for having me.
>> You're welcome. We know
that you're going to check that out
because there's so much more to
learn about conversational AI.
You can get started at the link shown
here and make sure that you do
bring this into your portfolio of skills so
that you too can improve the customer experience.