For the second time this year the headquarters of Microsoft Germany in Munich opened its doors to host the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Hackathon. A total of 18 teams of national Dynamics Partners came together to learn, share, create and innovate. Starting on November 24, the teams spent 48 hours to bring about fresh new business solutions using IoT, HoloLens, Kinect, Cortana und AI.
In the realm of linking Dynamics NAV products, the faveo team focused on the chat-based workspace Microsoft Teams®. To fuel innovation in the AI domain, the faveo team challenged itself to connect Microsoft Teams® with Dynamics NAV. The main idea was to establish a conversational interaction between both frameworks.
To integrate natural language processing, the platform of Microsoft’s Cognitive Suite LUIS i.e. Language Understanding Intelligent Service was used. LUIS intercepts a request and converts it to comparable action, based on three tenets: The service identifies the user’s intent, determined from spoken or textual input or utterances. Important words from utterances become extracted business entities, essential to fulfil an intent. In a second step, LUIS was configured to interpret intents and act accordingly. The service was further integrated into a chatbot and deployed in Dynamics NAV via another webservice.
As a result, faveo created a chatbot for Microsoft Teams® that is able to communicate with Dynamics NAV. The prototype can evaluate user input and generates the queried data from a linked Dynamics NAV system into the chat.
Scenario
The chatbot enables contextual interaction, providing tremendous potential of application. Companies and Organizations may benefit in various fields. Depending on the chosen data from Dynamics NAV, requests such as „Show me the sales amount of last month“ or „Show the sales amount of the current year“ can be answered.
To illustrate one out of many opportunities to leverage Microsoft Teams® chatbots, faveo presented a vacation request during the Hackathon. Employees can simply type in the „vacation request“ and preferred start and end date, while the chatbot creates the vacation request inside Dynamics NAV.
