Integrating Bot Framework with api.ai

My go-to NLU service for all the bot prototypes that I build with Microsoft Bot Framework is LUIS. This time, however, I needed to build a bot that would speak a language that LUIS doesn’t understand yet. I needed my bot to speak Russian.

api.ai

The Bot Framework comes with built-in support for LUIS but it’s not hard to build your own intent recognizer.

It probably took me under ten minutes to sign up for api.ai, orient myself with the tool, and train an agent that would understand one intent and extract one entity out of it. Their web interface is very slick, very intuitive to navigate.

I didn’t set up any events or actions, didn’t configure webhook fulfillments, and didn’t use the one-click integrations. All I needed my api.ai agent to do was to recognize the intent and extract the entity. Everything else in my case is done by the Bot Framework.

I could now send the request with my user’s utterance to api.ai and receive a JSON payload back:

{
  "id": "42384260-8f60-4473-9e69-1dab4b286fa6",
  "timestamp": "2017-03-23T13:46:34.812Z",
  "lang": "ru",
  "result": {
    "source": "agent",
    "resolvedQuery": "хочу купить кофеварку",
    "action": "",
    "actionIncomplete": false,
    "parameters": {
      "product": "кофеварка"
    },
    "contexts": [],
    "metadata": {
      "intentId": "a407b3f7-5874-4d97-b261-e3564d8dfc4d",
      "webhookUsed": "false",
      "webhookForSlotFillingUsed": "false",
      "intentName": "buyCoffeeMaker"
    },
    "fulfillment": {
      "speech": "",
      "messages": [
        {
          "type": 0,
          "speech": ""
        }
      ]
    },
    "score": 1
  },
  "status": {
    "code": 200,
    "errorType": "success"
  },
  "sessionId": "af9eb509-77cb-402b-a32c-d28f7d8d3aa2"
}

Recognizer

api.ai comes with an SDK for pretty much any platform you will want to use it on. I build bots with node.js and they had the npm package for me:

const apiai = require('apiai');
const app = apiai(process.env.APIAI_TOKEN);

module.exports = {
    recognize: function (context, callback) {
        const request = app.textRequest(context.message.text, {
            sessionId: `${Math.random()}`,
            language: 'ru-RU'
        });

        request.on('response', function (response) {
            const result = response.result;

            callback(null, {
                intent: result.metadata.intentName,
                score: result.score,
                entities: Object.keys(result.parameters)
                    .filter(key => !!result.parameters[key])
                    .map(key => ({
                        entity: result.parameters[key],
                        type: key,
                        score: 1
                    }))
            });
        });

        request.on('error', function (error) {
            callback(error);
        });

        request.end();
    }
};

And that’s it. My bot speaks Russian now.