Create Smarter Bot Enabled Apps with AgilePoint NX

In this article I am going to walk you through a scenario of a bot enabled AgilePoint NX application where the bot is powered by Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing. A lot of businesses are moving towards bot enabling their operations not just to perform repetitive tasks which do not need human intervention but also to create much better engaging experience for the clients visiting their website.

Bot Framework helps build and connect intelligent bots to interact with your users naturally wherever they are — from your website or app to Cortana, Skype, Teams, Office 365 mail, Slack, Facebook Messenger Skype for Business and more.

Modern day software platforms promise to make life easier and it’s easy to see how bots can help fulfill that promise especially when it comes to a work environment. Bots simplify user’s engagement with system by automating tasks, so that you don’t have to have human intervention. Bots also free up time, energy, and resources, so you can concentrate on things that require a human touch.

However any bot would just provide the initial experience. At some point of time, the information collected by bot has to be fed into a business process and perform some operations on the collected data. This is where AgilePoint’s Bot integration comes in. Here are some of the key features shown in the demo app.

1) You can kickoff a business process from your Bot conversation at the desired time.
2) The process itself can post back messages to the same conversation window where a chat was going on between user and the bot.
3) User messages or choices can subsequently change the routing of the business app.

For this demo I am going to use a sample application which I created where a user comes to a law firm website to schedule a phone consultation. The Bot greets the user and walks him through the process of collecting this information either through text or voice enabled channel and once information is collected, that data is passed on to AgilePoint NX eForms app to process payment, schedule consultation etc. For my demo I am using Skype as a client but bot Framework does support many more chat clients.

Also the bot can be integrated with Microsoft cognitive services like sentiment analysis which I covered in other video, Cortana, Bing Speech API etc. to get a seamless experience. Moreover Bot Framework can also be integrated by LUIS i.e. Language Understanding Intelligent Service which adds conversational intelligence to your apps just like you see in Siri or Alexa.

I can use LUIS for language interpretation and setup a model as shown in video briefly but I am not using that in current demo scenario as it was more of a guided data collection experience. LUIS is something I would have used for a more random user based interaction like resetting my password or to perform my daily business tasks which have a high level of need for interpreting what user is saying or typing. I am going to use that in my next Bot demo where I manage AgilePoint NX task itself from Bot.

Just like people communicate with each other using a combination of gestures, voice, and symbols, bots can
communicate with users using a combination of rich user controls, text (sometimes including natural language),
and speech. You do not need to choose one over another.

 

Here is a quick video on my sample bot app which lets user provide inputs both through text as well as voice enabled channels. For voice I have used the built in natural language processing engine but you can very well use Bing Speech API, Cortana etc. to provide better voice interpretation.

If you have a similar use cases, AgilePoint services team can help build bot enabled apps for your organization as well.