Tying the Cognitive Service for Language to the chat bot for NLP

One of the first ways we can enhance our bot experience is by changing the conversation, literally, to interpretation, enabling us to shift from a contextual understanding to a conversational understanding. As we will display later in the chapter with our working example from Ocean Smart, this can apply to a customer checking on the status of an order, or a whole other host of options. To understand what challenge our customer is having, we ask for the order number to check on the status, but without the Conversational Language Understanding (CLU) capability of the Cognitive Service for Language, the bot would just see a sequence of numbers and letters. Of course, with no other understanding, the bot would be stuck without knowing what the number was or how to handle it.

Initially, these Language Understanding capabilities were handled by the Azure Language Understanding Service (LUIS), but it was announced that this...