The unified authoring canvas simplifies chatbot development a lot, with variable management, rich responses, adaptive cards, Power Fx formulas, etc. being available in product, and much more flexibility with the default topics.
Relying on the Bot Framework Composer is quite complex for a lot of non-developers.
New capabilities also keep getting added to it, like Copilot and Conversation Boosters.
"The new connection between the modules are worse than before where we could connect the dots whenever we need then to": what do you mean? There is a "Go to step" feature now that I found easier to use.
For multiple choice, or when you get a "Did You Mean", we send a list of suggested actions to the client.
E.g. the suggestedActions over the Direct Line API:
{
"type": "message",
"id": "67SwOMOHSsuEWUf0WR57o2-us|0000003",
"timestamp": "2023-04-20T12:55:41.678177Z",
"channelId": "directline",
"from": {
"id": "2d3aae11-a9f8-4796-abdc-99f6a84c0f6c",
"name": "Contoso Bot",
"role": "bot"
},
"conversation": {
"id": "67SwOMOHSsuEWUf0WR57o2-us"
},
"textFormat": "plain",
"text": "To clarify, did you mean:",
"speak": "To clarify, did you mean: Store Locations, Order, Ship To, None of these.",
"inputHint": "acceptingInput",
"suggestedActions": {
"actions": [
{
"type": "imBack",
"title": "Store Locations",
"value": "Store Locations"
},
{
"type": "imBack",
"title": "Order",
"value": "Order"
},
{
"type": "imBack",
"title": "Ship To",
"value": "Ship To"
},
{
"type": "imBack",
"title": "None of these",
"value": "None of these"
}
]
},
"attachments": [],
"entities": [],
"replyToId": "67SwOMOHSsuEWUf0WR57o2-us|0000002"
}
So each client (Teams, web chat widget, custom app, etc.) renders the suggested actions in their own way. For richer experiences, Adaptive Cards are the way to go.
Keep posting and suggesting improvements - we do look at them and at the business cases you share behind them to prioritze them. Just know that not all customers have the same priorities and we also depend on a lot of related technologies that share common standards.
Regarding greyed out the text inputs on the client side, I gave the SMS example because you can deploy your PVA bot to many channel, including SMS, Teams, etc. you need to make sure that the "disable text input" instructions is something standard across chat client, which isn't the case (i.e. on your phone over an SMS channel you can always enter text). So here the use-case is very dependent on where the chatbot is deployed to.
Henry
