If you are moving from the old Colloquis IDE to the Visual Studio-based Windows Live Agents SDK, and you've never used Visual Studio, you may be a little lost. This post aims to collect simple hints and tricks for agent developers new to working with Visual Studio. This is just a start -- if you have...

Use Dialogs Dialogs create a more interactive experience and help the user to feel like he/she is driving the conversation. Example: - Hey, I have really cool games. You wanna see them? ? Yes. - Here are my games: <empty/> Hangman {*} Word Scramble {*} Reversi {*} ...

Use Canonical Questions A canonical question establishes the most concise, “representative” question for a topic. If a user asks an ambiguous question, the agent responds with a clarification request using the canonicals for each matched topic. Note that only one question should be marked as a canonical...

Create Good Subpatterns Subpatterns are one of the most powerful NL recognition features in the BuddyScript language. They allow you to write efficient, reusable code. Many subpatterns are defined in various packages in the Vocabulary directories for each language in BuddyScriptLib. Have a look at...

Today we will start a series on best practices for developing a Windows Live Agent (WLA). Here we go: Use the WLATemplate Project as a Starting Point The WLATemplate Project (“C:\Program Files\Colloquis\Colloquis SDK\Projects\WLATemplate“) is a generic project you can quickly customize into...