Create a QnA Bot with Azure Bot Service

• 05/07/2018
• 2 minutes to read
• Contributors
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This tutorial walks you through building a QnA bot with Azure Bot service on the Azure portal.

Prerequisite

Before you build, follow the steps in Create a knowledge base to create a QnA Maker service with questions and answers.

The bot responds to questions from the knowledge base you created, via the QnAMakerDialog.

Create a QnA Bot

1. In the Azure portal, select Create new resource in the menu blade, and then select See all.

   

2. In the search box, search for Web App Bot.

   

3. In the Bot Service blade, provide the required information, and select Create. This creates and deploys the bot service with QnAMakerDialog to Azure.

   • Set App name to your bot’s name. The name is used as the subdomain when your bot is deployed to the cloud (for example, mynotesbot.azurewebsites.net).
   • Select the subscription, resource group, App service plan, and location.
   • Select the Question and Answer (Node.js or C#) template for the Bot template field.

   • Select the confirmation checkbox for the legal notice. The terms of the legal notice are below the checkbox.

     

4. Confirm that the bot service has been deployed.

   • Select Notifications (the bell icon that is located along the top edge of the Azure portal). The notification will change from Deployment started to Deployment succeeded.
   • After the notification changes to Deployment succeeded, select Go to resource on that notification.

Chat with the Bot

Selecting Go to resource takes you to the bot's resource blade.

Once the bot is registered, click Test in Web Chat to open the Web Chat pane. Type "hello" in Web Chat.

The bot responds with "Please set QnAKnowledgebaseId and QnASubscriptionKey in App Settings. Learn how to get them at https://aka.ms/qnaabssetup". This response confirms that your QnA Bot has received the message, but there is no QnA Maker knowledge base associated with it yet. Do that in the next step.

Connect your QnA Maker knowledge base to the bot

1. Open Application Settings and edit the QnAKnowledgebaseId, QnAAuthKey, and the QnAEndpointHostName fields to contain the values of your QnA Maker knowledge base.

   

2. Get your knowledge base ID, host url, and the endpoint key from the settings tab of your knowledge base in https://qnamaker.ai.

   • Log in to QnA Maker
   • Go to your knowledge base
   • Click on the Settings tab

   • Publish your knowledge base, if not already done so

     

Test the bot

In the Azure portal, click on Test in Web Chat to test the bot.

Your QnA Bot now answers from your knowledge base.

Next steps

See also

• Manage your knowledge base
• Enable your bot in different channels