BakeBot - A Bot for our Bakery Built with the Microsoft Bot Framework

As our small business grew we increasingly found that customers had the same types of questions over and over again. To help our bakery grow while staying engaged with social media (and to avoid significant labor costs in repetitive actions) we built a “bakery bot” or BakeBot.

In this blog series we’ll walk through the concepts, design and code required to build a bot using the Microsoft Bot Framework. We’ll leverage several Azure services to add value to the conversation with our customers by using data we’ve already got in our organization.

This article is part of an ongoing series on the Microsoft Bot Framework.

The ability for developers to create engaging, believable - and more importantly, useful - bots has been evolving rapidly over the last few years. Today, we have access to some incredible services and frameworks that allow us to rapidly build bots we can leverage to fill business needs.

The surface area that bots can reach has grown, too, with every major messaging platform providing integration capabilities for bot frameworks to interact with users. From Facebook to Skype to SMS and beyond, the number of users that can access your bot using paradigms they already understand is extensive and growing both locally and globally.

We’re reaching a new level of artificial pseudo-sentience where the “conversational UI” will emerge as a common pattern for customers to interact with companies, large and small alike. At Chez Angela, our bakery is using all kinds of new features of Azure to make our company successful and help our customers get at the information they need. We’re excited about what BakeBot can help us accomplish, from ordering to scheduling to answering common questions about allergies, ingredients and product availability.

Posts In This Bot Series
Day 1: What a Bot Is (And What It Is Not)
Day 2: Choosing a Channel
Next up: QnA Maker & Your First Bot

Is there a topic you’d like to see that’s not in the mix? Please leave a comment below!

Happy coding!