Build an Aura Bot dialog

Introduction

Dialogs are software components that model conversations with the final users by interchanging messages with them. Currently, aura-bot supports the Microsoft Bot Framework SDK v4 for JavaScript as the internal bot engine.

When developing a local use case, that can be both an experience built from scratch or inspired in a global use case, the OB developers must build a new local dialog that includes the logic of the use case or modify an existing one.

The dialog will interact with the customer using a conversational interface, this is, interchanging messages back and forth and, if required, the dialog will summon Kernel or third-party APIs in order to fetch data to fulfil the user’s request.

Before getting started, we recommend you to read some useful Microsoft documentation:
📄 Send and receive text message
📄 Dialogs library

Scenarios for building a dialog

Bot developers can find different scenarios when building a dialog over aura-bot:

• Build an Aura Bot library that will contain the dialog, in case it does not exist.
• General guidelines for building a dialog: most common scenario for building a dialog over aura-bot
• Build a dialog that use async APIs, that is, APIs that do not provide the information back immediately, but with a certain standby time as they must perform a specific task derived from the user’s request.
• Configure bypass mode to force sending any input message to aura-bot directly to a external service and vice versa.
• Build an operation, which are a type of intents that can be used inside a dialog’s conversational flow.
• Migrate a dialog to channelData v3, including the steps for making your use case compatible with channelData v3.
• Migrate use cases to Bot Framework 4.19, which is the version used by Aura’s upcoming architecture based on Microsoft skills protocol.