Updating your custom Skill

aka.ms/VAReadyDemo4

Develop your language understanding model

1. Navigate to https://preview.luis.ai/ and click on the app named after the Skill you deployed: "{Azure resource name}en-us_{Skill name}"
2. Create a new Intent
3. Add utterances that you want to handle with that Intent
4. Click to Train and Test your app
5. Once you're ready to continue, click to Publish to production

Update your local custom Skill

1. In a PowerShell Core window, navigate to your custom Skill's directory and run:

   ./Deployment/Scripts/update_cognitive_models.ps1 -RemoteToLocal
   

Develop your dialog

1. In Visual Studio, open the Skill's Dialogs/MainDialog.cs class

2. In the RouteStepAsync() method, add switch-case statement to handle your new Intent

3. Inside the new case, send a message in response to the user:

   await stepContext.Context.SendActivityAsync("<RESPONSE_MESSAGE>");
   return await stepContext.NextAsync();
   

4. Save your changes and press F5 to start the Skill locally

5. Open the Emulator to test the local custom Skill

6. Click create a new bot configuration and enter the following:

   1. Bot name: Custom Skill
   2. Endpoint url: http://localhost:3978/api/messages
   3. Microsoft App ID: Copy-paste the "microsoftAppId" from the Skill's appsettings.json
   4. Microsoft App password: Copy-paste the "microsoftAppPassword" from the Skill's appsettings.json

7. Click Save and connect to run your bot

8. Test an utterance you trained in LUIS to see the new response message returned locally

Publish and update the Virtual Assistant connection

1. Update your custom Skill's manifest (we will skip this for now - waiting for more documentation to be released.)

2. In your custom Skill solution in Visual Studio, right-click and Publish the project again

3. Once publishing is complete, navigate to Test in Webchat to see your updated Skill running in Azure

4. In a PowerShell Core window, navigate to the Virtual Assistant project directory

5. To update the Virtual Assistant with the changes you made to the Skill, run the following command:

   botskills update --remoteManifest "http://<SKILL_AZURE_NAME>.azurewebsites.net/manifest/manifest-1.1.json" --luisFolder "..\..\<SKILL_PROJECT_NAME>\<SKILL_PROJECT_NAME>\Deployment\Resources\LU" --languages "en-us" --cs
   

   Once that completes, your local Virtual Assistant can now route your new trained utterances to the custom Skill

6. Open the Virtual Assistant in the Emulator again to test your new utterances from LUIS

7. In the Virtual Assistant solution in Visual Studio, right-click on the project in the Solution Explorer window and select Publish

8. Once publishing is complete, navigate to Test in Webchat to see your updated Virtual Assistant running in Azure

Some next steps

• Create bot responses using Language Generation
• Connect your Virtual Assistant to the Power BI Template
• Enable Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment
• Participate on GitHub
• Adaptive Dialogs