Customer interaction is essential to a business of any size, and response-automation is a key component to scaling up communication volume. In fact, 61% of consumers prefer to communicate via speech, and most of them prefer self-service. Because customer satisfaction is a priority for all businesses, self-service is a critical facet of any customer-facing communications strategy.

This solution creates an intelligent interactive voice response (IVR) application that processes customer order requests for bicycles and bicycle accessories. Businesses with no existing IVR solution can easily get started automating requests, or where existing human-operated systems exist, this solution can be extended to incorporate existing functionality and workflows.

Today, mobile phones are dominant, but keypads are not always readily accessible. This solution provides an intuitive, simple, and convenient way for callers to convey their requests and receive immediate responses. The outcome is an intelligent and natural self-service experience that can be repurposed across other customer-facing channels.

This solution package contains materials to help both technical and business audiences understand the solution, which is built on Azure and Microsoft Cognitive Services.

• Skype Client
  User initiates call
• Bot Connector + Skype Calling Channel
  Routes calls from Skype to the bot
• Azure App Services
  Hosts the bot application, which manages logic and API calls
• Cosmos DB
  Stores bot state and event logs
• Bing Speech Service
  Processes speech-to-text
• LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service)
  Extracts intent and entities from text
• Azure Search
  Indexes the product catalog for product-query matching
• Azure SQL
  Stores product and order data
• Azure Storage
  Stores bot audio data for debugging

In this repository you will find a folder called Solution Overview for Business Audiences. This folder contains a PowerPoint deck that covers the benefits of using this solution and the ways that it leverages the power of Microsoft Cognitive Services.

For more information on how to tailor Cortana Intelligence to your needs connect with one of our partners.

See the Manual Deployment Guide folder for a full set of instructions on how to customize and deploy this solution on Azure. For technical problems or questions about deploying this solution, please create an issue in this repository.

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