You’re returning to work and you want to get your Smart Restart off the ground, but you are concerned about a flood of requests hitting your service desk. You want to create something that will provide immediate value but has a low time to implement. We had the same problem and started with a simple bot to answer our team’s questions.

How do we do this? Pretty simple, let’s walk through it and get us off the ground. Here are the steps:

QnA Maker

The QnA Maker sevice is a very intuitive way to create a bot that is scalable and used in a variety of places. Let’s get started.

Start by navigating to QnA Maker and creating the QnA service

Fill in the details of your new bot:

You can then select your bot from the drop down in QnA maker:

Then, name your KB

Then, create your knowledge KB document (you can modify this later), which contains the key questions and answers for your bot. You can get a nice template from Chloe Condon’s blog here:

Then select the “chit chat” level… I’m going “friendly”, since I’m trying to emphasize empathy.

Then select “Create KB”

You then end up with this:

Make sure to test it, to ensure you did everything right

Next step, navigate to the Azure portal and the bot you’ve created to test the same requests in the web test environment:

Now, go to Settings and grab the App ID:

Now, we have a functional bot… let’s build the bot in Teams. Navigate to Teams and go to the App Studio:

Create a new App in the Manifest Editor, follow the prompts and complete the various fields tied to your bot.

Now, use an “existing bot” and insert the App ID that you captured earlier:

You are then in the position to install the app into Teams for testing!

It will then show the same configuration here:

Now, to take this all the way, you need to publish it. You also will need to have good content and a deployment plan. Enjoy and I hope this helps you accelerate your response.

Nathan Lasnoski