webex

Following Microsoft Build last week and the release of Botkit 4.0, I thought it would be a nice idea to take a look and see what’s new.

“Why would Microsoft Build matter when I’m building a bot for Webex Teams” I hear you ask! Well, since the announcement in November last year that XOXCO (the people behind Botkit) were going to join Microsoft, they have clearly been very busy rebuilding and rearchitecting Botkit to fit into the wider ecosystem that is the Microsoft Bot Framework and the Bot Framework SDK (previously BotBuilder).

In doing so, this should make it much simpler to integrate into other areas of the Bot Framework, such as the Cognitive Services provided by LUIS.ai and QnA Maker.

In this post, I will create a simple FAQ Bot using Microsoft QnA Maker and Botkit. In addition, it will use a spreadsheet hosted on SharePoint so that the relevant team can maintain the content without any requirement to update the Bot.

This particular requirement is how I started my Go journey. I’d taken an initial look with other languages – it looked doable but not that straight forward. Plus, I ideally wanted a command line tool that I could give to other people. Python and Node just weren’t going to cut it. I was keen to take a look at Go and thought I would see if it could meet my needs. As it turned out, it was super simple and definitely the right choice.