Chat Bots & Voice Control : Applications and limitations of combining Microsoft’s Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services’ Speech API

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has seen much development in recent years. This is mostly because of new technologies and computers becoming faster. With actors like Microsoft releasing software to reduce the complexity of the development of AI, the barrier to entry is now lower than ever. Due to this lower barrier, one area that has gained much traction is chat bots, being able to act as first line support for companies. While the technology is evolving fast and updates to Microsoft’s tools are released at an impressive rate, it appears to be difficult for other areas like documentation and ease of use to keep up with this pace. This thesis will explore some tools from Microsoft used in AI development. Areas covered are the Cognitive Services with a focus on speech, the Microsoft Azure Bot Service, the QnA Maker and the bot framework’s web-based client. These tools will be evaluated in the context of a chat bot, taking into account their functionality and development. The result is a chat bot that uses a knowledge base for data storage & answer logic, and a web interface for chat functionalities using the bot framework web-client