Integrating External Bots

Introduction

Chime for Teams supports integration of external Microsoft Bot Framework bots. These bots can be used to help deflect incoming chats as appropriate, using your existing QnA Knowledge Base. There are two basic approaches to bot integration with Chime: "Bot beside Chime," or having an external bot integrated via Queue Settings; and "Bot in front of Chime," where your bot is outside of Chime and proxies conversations over DirectLine to helpdesk queues.

Some quickstart examples of these two approaches can be found here.

##Registering an External Bot in Chime (Bot alongside Chime)

We have provided an interface to make integrating an external bot into Chime simple. Once you have your chatbot created in Microsoft Azure, follow the steps below to integrate your bot alongside a Chime queue.

###Gather bot information

Navigate to https://portal.azure.com/ and log into the subscription in which your bot is hosted.
Find and record the information for the Direct Line Secret, Bot Display Name, and Microsoft App ID.

Add the bot in Chime

Keep the information you gathered in the last step handy. You are ready to integrate the bot into Chime.

Navigate to the Chime Admin dashboard
Click the External Bots tab on the center panel.

Select Add Bot in the top right corner of the window.

Enter the Bot Name, Bot ID, and Directline Secret

Click Verify Settings to verify connection to the bot. Once the bot has verified click on the Save button on the bottom right of the window. <IMG src="https://www.addchime.com/assets/img/ss/teams/bot-integration/admin-bot-integration.png"/>

Call Bot from Queue

Add a bot before routing to an Agent

Now that you have added your external bot to your Chime server through the Chime Admin settings, you can add your bot to your Chime queues. For each queue you wish to integrate your bot into:

Select "My Manager Home" then "Manage Queues" from the dropdown menu.
Navigate to the Queue Settings on the queue you wish to add your bot.

Select the Integration tab, then Add Bot

Select the bot you would like to add via the popup menu

You can now find the bot in the queue!

Call Bot from Interview

You can give users the option for self service before routing to an agent by calling your bot from the Chime interview. Follow these steps to have an interview pass a chat over to a bot.

Navigate to the Interview tab in the Queue Settings.
Click the Add New Choice button.
Name the choice in the first question.
Select Go to Bot in the second column.
Choose the bot to route to in the third column.

Bot Text Resources

This section will cover how to customize the Text Resources that guests will see when they interact with a bot.

Navigate to the Text Resources tab in the Queue Settings.
Scroll down to the External Bot Messages resource.

-Click the Edit button on the right side.

In the designer you can choose to display the message as plain text or as an Adaptive Card.

More editing tools for adaptive cards can be found by clicking on the Edit in Designer button.

In the editor, you can control which card elements show up and add or remove content.

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