Virtual-Assistant | A linux based Virtual assistant on Artificial Intelligence in C | Machine Learning library

We have Microsoft Virtual Assistant built it Typescript and we are planning to add Timeout capability. What this means is VA should end the conversation with its Skill if user is not engaged for certain amount of time.

There is botbuilder-timeout module to do this in V3 SDK which says,

"Module for Microsoft Bot Framework to enable your bot to prompt the user if the bot detects inactivity and ultimately end the conversation if no user activity after a defined period of time."

Is there anything in V4 or Virtual Assistant that offers similar capability ? If yes any ideas/pointers to document is appreciated.

Do you know if there is way to implement global message handlers that can support commands like stop, bye, cancel, exit Virtual assistant bot ? I am trying to implement something like this.

I have a virtual assistant built already and it has couple of Skills or Skill Bots. When user is in the multi turn conversation with a Skill, user should be able to exit out of skill by commands like stop, bye, cancel, exit.

I found old v3 doc but nothing for v4.

I use Virtual Assistant. I am going to use Entity Framework Core for saving state. I met a problem. IStorage interface injects like a singleton because other objects which use this interface injects as a singleton.

I installed the newly launched virtual assistant template (C#) of the bot framework, downloaded it from here https://github.com/microsoft/botframework-solutions/tree/master/templates/Virtual-Assistant-Template/csharp and deployed it using deployment scripts and the default setup works well.

According to the documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/bot-service/bot-builder-virtual-assistant-template?view=azure-bot-service-4.0#content-moderator, content moderator is optional but enabled. It says "A middleware component is provided that screen texts and surfaces through a TextModeratorResult on the TurnState object." I see cognitive service for Content-moderator has been created and the secret key appears in the appsettings but startup does not instantate the object neither does the botservice.

But, I do not see any evidence of it in the code. Searching keys such as "TextModeratorResult", "TurnState", "contentModerator" does not return anything.

Is this something we need to instantiate? Are there any guidelines?

I'm trying to create a simple way for product owners to stand up and tear down the Azure resources required for the Virtual Assistant. However, the deployment script deploy.ps1 requires PowerShell 6+, which doesn't seem to be available with Azure DevOps.

What's the best way to proceed?

The goal is to use a release pipeline to automatically stand up the Azure resources required for the bot to function.

• Is there a way to use PowerShell 6+ using Azure PowerShell?
• Should we not use deploy.ps1 to deploy the resources in a DevOps release pipeline?

Here's the contents of deploy.ps1 and a link to the latest.

I am trying to deploy the latest Microsoft Virtual Assistant code. In the documentation, they describe a process to deploy and run the bot using a Visual Studio template. The whole process described in the documentation works great.

However, I don't like using a template. I don't want to loose Microsoft's Git history. Also, this deployment needs to stand the tests of time, and I want to make it as simple as possible to merge updates from Microsoft.

Inside of Microsoft's repo, there is a subdirectory containing the C# Virtual Assistant template and a sample of the code as if it were deployed by the template.

I'll describe my solution, which lets me preserve Microsoft's Git history, pull their latest commits with ease and still gives me a reasonably sized project for working on my client's bot deployment (the Microsoft AI repo is huge and contains many things I don't want in my bot deployment). The resulting branch/project that I'm working on very closely resembles (vide infra, appears identical to) the solution/project that I get when I create it from the template in Visual Studio.

1. I forked Microsoft's entire GitHub repo.
2. I setup a local Git repository with both Microsoft's repository and my fork as remotes.
3. I used Git subtree, as described on this Stack Overflow post to filter the repo down to just the Virtual Assistant C# sample code. I created a branch for this subtree.
4. I copied the subtree branch into a develop branch, where I intend to do all my custom development.
5. I can use master on Microsoft's upstream remote and the newly created subtree branch to continually pull new commits from Microsoft into my personal develop branch.

Here's some pseudo-code that roughly walks through the process.