As most of you know, Mission Mars: Fourth Horizon is currently progressing on the surface of the red planet. It represents the human race’s first steps in colonizing the solar system. A terraforming operation will soon take place, and for the first time, humans will be born on a planet other than Earth.
But, in the meantime, our Martian crew is desperately short-handed. Radio contact with Earth is painfully slow, due to the distances involved, so we must rely on automated assistance wherever possible. You are here to build that capability.
Together, we will be creating the Mars Assisted Experience… or M.A.X.
M.A.X. will be an artificially intelligent chat bot, offering technical support, mission guidance and emotional monitoring to the crew. To make sure M.A.X. is integrated into the crew quickly, we’re also going to add a bit of personality. They’re a virtual crew member in their own right, after all.
Once deployed, we anticipate M.A.X. will greatly improve morale on the surface of Mars, as technical issues can be reported quicker, self-service support will be delivered more easily, and crew satisfaction constantly measured. What’s more, since M.A.X. never sleeps, they’ll be the most productive crew member in history!
Throughout these labs you will learn how to create a Help Desk bot. You can choose between C# and Node.js and detailed step-by-step instructions and high-level instructions. You are free to use either sets of instructions to complete the lab.
The goal of the high-level steps is to offer a challenge to developers who like to work through things on their own with minimal guidance. The goal of the step-by-step instructions is to provide prescriptive instructions for developers who are looking for a more structured experience. You may find reading through the high-level steps first, and then using the step-by-step instructions for additional support, can be a successful way to complete the exercises.
You can perform all the exercises in order, or do only try some of them. Each exercise instructs which code to use as starting point, if you did not make the previous exercise. In addition, each exercise contains additional challenges (without provided solutions), offering you the opportunity to enhance your bot and gain more skills.
| Exercise | High Level Instructions | Detailed Instructions | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Creating Your First "Echo" Bot with the Bot Builder SDK | Document | C# - Node |
| 2 | Submitting help desk tickets with the bot | Document | C# - Node |
| 3 | Making the bot smarter with language understanding (LUIS) | Document | C# - Node |
| 4 | Implementing a help desk KB with Azure Search and Cosmos DB | Document | C# - Node |
| 5 | Deploying your bot to the cloud | Document | C# - Node |
| 6 | Determine the sentiments behind a user's message | Document | C# - Node |
| 7 | Hand off the conversation to a human agent | Document | C# - Node |
| 8 | Send and Receive Events Through a Backchannel | Document | C# - Node |