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Cognitive Services LUIS & Azure Bot Service GA!

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Cognitive Services Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) , natural language analysis model generator & analyzer API, goes GA. And also Azure Bot Service, chatbot develop & deploy service on Azure and connector to multiple communication tools, announced to go GA too.
Microsoft Azure Blog > Announcing the General Availability of Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding, enabling developers to build better conversational bots Azure Team Blog > Conversational Bots Deep Dive – What’s new with the General Availability of Azure Bot Service and Language Understanding

Cognitive Services LUIS : Dec 2017 Update

GA & Price Plan

  • F0 (Free Tier)
    • ~ 10000 transaction / month
  • S1 (Standard Tier: paid plan)
    • 153JPY / 1000 transaction (pay-as-you-go)
  • text limited to 500 letters(incl 2-bytes characters) per transaction

You can create F0 and S1 from Azure Portal. There is no limit period for use (even free F0 Tier).

New Portal

LUIS had 2 function to creating LUIS App (= analysis model) to adopt each domain, and to analyze sentences via web API. There is GUI (Portal) to create, study and train LUIS App, which renewed on GA.

There are LUIS Programmatic API to configure LUIS App. You can create new LUIS App, study, train etc not using LUIS Portal. Those make possible to create custom management tools, or automate re-study and re-train process with your own.

Cognitive Services LUIS Programmatic API Doc

Evolving Intents & Entities Limitation much more than ever

Upper limits of Intents and Entities in preview elevated very much.

  • Intent : 80 → 500
  • Entity : 30 → 100

New Regions

Regions where deploy LUIS App and access as endpoint (web API URL) are formerly 5 and 7 are added as new ones.

  • America
    • West US, East US2, West Central US
    • +South Central US, East US, West US 2, Brazil South
  • Europe
    • West Europe
    • +North Europe
  • Asia Pacific
    • Southeast Asia
    • +East Asia, Australia East

Technical Update : multilingual support

Several languages are newly supported where features below limited only in English.

    • Prebuild Entities
      • enable to add presets of frequent entities (datetime, geography, etc)
      • new supported languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese
    • Prebuild Domains
      • enable to add presets of frequent domain (intents and entities)
      • new supported language: Chinese
    • Phrase List Suggestion
      • available phrases "list" which can be attach to Entities to recognize; suggest available phrases when create & edit list
      • new supported languages: : Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, French, Portuguese, German, Italian

 

Azure Bot Service : Dec 2017 Update

GA & New Price Plan

With GA,  SLA is established also Azure Support available (*).

  • F0 (Free Tier)
    • DirectLine & WebChat : ~ 10000 messages/month
    • (no limit for other channels)
  • S1 (Standard Tier: Paid Plan)
    • DirectLine & WebChat : 51 JPY/1000 messages/month
  • Azure Bot Service is deployed on Azure WebApp or Azure Function and it costs individually for Web App or Function (+Storage、AppInsight and other services) (You can attach free plan for those)

As same as used to, F0 and S1 can be created and managed from Azure Portal (no limit for usage period).

(*)99.9% SLA on DirectLine and WebChat 、able to use Azure Supports incidents

Deployed region

All regions for Web App / Function available to host Azure Bot Service app. Here is endpoint regions;

  • America
    • East US, West US, Brazil South
  • Europe
    • North Europe, West Europe
  • Asia Pacific
    • East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia East, Australia Southeast

Enhancements/Changes as Bot Framework

  • Terminate of Bot Framework State service
    • Access to memory storage to keep conversation info
    • able to add control and own conversation state storage
  • Azure Bot Service only to registration to Bot Directory/Connector
    • seems to be most impacted change for present users...
      • There appears "Bot Channels Registration" when create new service on Azure Portal. (When access to Bot Framework for registration as used to, it forwards you to Azure Portal.)
    • Knowledge Graph Exchange registration required to use Cortana Channels due to Cortana Skills integration into it.