Adding Bot to Microsoft Teams

11th of October, 2017 / / No Comments

If you are following up on my previous blog posts about Bots and integrating LUIS with them, you are almost done with building bots and already had some fun with it. Now it’s time to bring them to life and let internal or external users interact with Bot via some sort of front end channel accessible by them. If you haven’t read my previous posts on the subject yet, please give them a read at Creating a Bot and Creating a LUIS app before reading further.… [Keep reading] “Adding Bot to Microsoft Teams”

Using a Bot Framework to build LUIS enabled Bots

23rd of September, 2017 / / No Comments

History

In this post, we are going to build a bot using Microsoft Bot framework and add intelligence to it to extract meanings from the conversation with users utilising Microsoft cognitive service named LUIS. The last post discussed details about LUIS, give it a read before you continue on reading. This post assumes you have a basic understanding of Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) and Bot Framework, further details can be read about them at LUIS and Bot Framework.… [Keep reading] “Using a Bot Framework to build LUIS enabled Bots”

Getting started developing Custom Actions for the Google Assistant (Home)

22nd of September, 2017 / / No Comments

 

Introduction

Whilst I was in the USA recently I bought myself a Google Home. My home already had Hue Lights, Chromecast on a couple of TV’s and I’m a big user of Spotify (Premium). It was very quick to get it up and running and doing simple tasks, but I started thinking about what custom things I could get it to do. Could I get it to call custom/private API to get some information and let me know the result?… [Keep reading] “Getting started developing Custom Actions for the Google Assistant (Home)”

How LUIS can help BOTs in understanding natural language

15th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

Since bots are evolving, you need a mechanism to better understand what user wants from his/her language and take actions or respond to user queries appropriately. In the days of increasing automation, bots can certainly help provided they are backed by tools to understand user language both naturally and contextually.
Azure Cognitive Services has an API that can help to identify what user wants, extracts concepts and entities from a sentence (user input) using an intelligent service name Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS).… [Keep reading] “How LUIS can help BOTs in understanding natural language”

Ok Google Email me the status of all vms – Part 2

10th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com
In my last blog, we configured the backend systems necessary for accomplishing the task of asking Google Home “OK Google Email me the status of all vms” and it sending us an email to that effect. If you haven’t finished doing that, please refer back to my last blog and get that done before continuing.
In this blog, we will configure Google Home.
Google Home uses Google Assistant to do all the smarts.… [Keep reading] “Ok Google Email me the status of all vms – Part 2”

Ok Google Email me the status of all vms – Part 1

10th of September, 2017 / / No Comments

First published at https://nivleshc.wordpress.com
Technology is evolving at a breathtaking pace. For instance, the phone in your pocket has more grunt than the desktop computers of 10 years ago!
One of the upcoming areas in Computing Science is Artificial Intelligence. What seemed science fiction in the days of Isaac Asimov, when he penned I, Robot seems closer to reality now.
Lately the market is popping up with virtual assistants from the likes of Apple, Amazon and Google.… [Keep reading] “Ok Google Email me the status of all vms – Part 1”

Protect Your Business and Users from Email Phishing in a Few Simple Steps

1st of August, 2017 / / No Comments

The goal of email phishing attacks is obtain personal or sensitive information from a victim such as credit card, passwords or username data, for malicious purposes. That is to say trick a victim into performing an unwitting action aimed at stealing sensitive information from them. This form of attack is generally conducted by means of spoofed emails or instant messaging communications which try to deceive their target as to the nature of the sender and purpose of the email they’ve received.… [Keep reading] “Protect Your Business and Users from Email Phishing in a Few Simple Steps”

Getting started with Ubuntu on Windows (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

5th of July, 2017 / / No Comments

This week I was building in Azure a Linux Server (Ubuntu 14). I’d deployed my new Ubuntu Server and I went to connect to it. But I was on a brand new laptop. No tools with SSH installed. Damn. As I was about to go and get my usual windows favorite SSH tools I remembered a session of Build 2017 and Microsoft starting to talk more loudly about Windows Subsystem for Linux. Yes, Ubuntu on Windows, with SUSE and Fedora coming soon.… [Keep reading] “Getting started with Ubuntu on Windows (Windows Subsystem for Linux)”

Putting SQL to REST with Azure Data Factory

27th of June, 2017 / / No Comments

Microsoft’s integration stack has slowly matured over the past years, and we’re on the verge of finally breaking away from BizTalk Server, or are we? In this article I’m going to explore Azure Data Factory (ADF). Rather than showing the usual out of the box demo I’m going to demonstrate a real-world scenario that I recently encountered at one of Kloud’s customers.
ADF is a very easy to use and cost-effective solution for simple integration scenarios that can be best described as ETL in the ‘old world’.… [Keep reading] “Putting SQL to REST with Azure Data Factory”

Connecting Surface Hubs to Microsoft Operations Management Suite

27th of June, 2017 / / No Comments

At Kloud, we have Surface Hubs in our Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney regional offices. It makes sense  to monitor them using a central service, to which monitoring and diagnostic information can be aggregated.
This blog post covers the process of connecting your Surface Hub devices to Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS).
Before you start:

  • You need a Surface Hub (yes, obvious I know) set up and connected to your network. It’s a good idea to setup the device account before you connect it to OMS.
… [Keep reading] “Connecting Surface Hubs to Microsoft Operations Management Suite”