Glossary for Composer

APPLIES TO: Composer v2.x

This glossary defines words, phrases, and acronyms that have a specific meaning in Composer.

action

Actions are the main component of a trigger. They're what enable your bot to take action, whether in response to user input or any other event that may occur. Actions are powerful, and with them you can formulate and send a response, create and assign values to properties, manipulate the conversational flow, manage dialogs, and many other activities.

Additional information:

• See action in the dialog concept article.

activity

An action expressed by a bot, a channel, or a client that conforms to the Bot Framework Activity Schema.

adaptive dialog

Adaptive dialogs are a new way to model conversations that take the best of waterfall dialogs and prompts in the dialogs library. Adaptive dialogs are event-based. Using adaptive dialogs simplifies sophisticated conversation modeling primitives like building a dialog dispatcher and ability to handle interruptions elegantly. Adaptive dialogs derive from dialogs and interact with the rest of the Bot Framework SDK dialog system.

Additional information:

• See adaptive dialogs.

adaptive expression

Adaptive expressions are a new expressions language used with the Bot Framework SDK and other conversational AI components, like Bot Framework Composer, Language Generation,adaptive dialogs, and Adaptive Cards.

Additional information:

• See adaptive expressions

Application settings page

Contains settings you can customize for your Composer application. Use Composer settings on the navigation pane to open this page.

Additional information:

• See Application settings for Composer.

authoring canvas

A section of the Create page where users design and author their bot.

Bot responses page

An option in Composer's navigation pane. The Bot responses page is a central way to manage bot response .lg resources. From there, users can view all the .lg templates and edit them.

bot project

A bot project is a top-level container of multiple bots. A bot project must contain a root bot, and it may contain one or more local and/or remote skills.

child dialog

Every dialog that you create in Composer will be a child dialog. Dialogs can be nested multiple levels deep with the main dialog being the root of all dialogs in Composer. Each child dialog must have a parent dialog and parent dialogs can have zero or more child dialogs, but a child dialog can and must have only one parent dialog.

Additional information:

• The dialog concept article.
• Learn to create a child dialog in the Tutorial: Adding dialogs to your bot

Composer settings page

An option in Composer's navigation pane. It navigates users to the Application settings page where users manage settings for their bot and Composer.

Create page

An option in Composer's navigation pane. It navigates users to the Create page where users design and develop their bots.

default recognizer

The default recognizer applies Language Understanding (LUIS) and QnA Maker to interpret the user's input.

Additional information:

• See Language understanding in Composer.

dialog

Dialogs are the basic building blocks in Composer. Each dialog represents a portion of the bot's functionality that contains instructions for what the bot will do and how it will react to user input. Dialogs are composed of Recognizers that help understand and extract meaningful pieces of information from user's input, a language generator that helps generate responses to the user, triggers that enable your bot to catch and respond to events and actions that help you put together the flow of conversation that will occur when a specific event is captured via a Trigger. There are two types of dialogs in Composer: main dialog and child dialog. Dialogs are represented in declarative assets as .dialog files.

Additional information:

• The dialog concept article.

Emulator

The Bot Framework Emulator is a desktop application that allows bot developers to test and debug their bots, either locally or remotely. Using the Emulator, you can chat with your bot and inspect the messages it sends and receives. The Emulator displays messages as they would appear in a web chat UI and logs JSON requests and responses as you exchange messages with your bot. Before deploying your bot, you can run it locally and test it using the Emulator.

Additional information:

• The latest release of the Bot Framework Emulator

endpoint

In the Bot Connector Service, an endpoint is a programmatically addressable location where a bot or channel can receive activities.

entity

An entity contains the important details of the user's intent. It can be anything, a location, date, time, cuisine type, etc. An intent may have no entities, or it may have multiple entities, each providing additional details to help understand the needs of the user.

Additional information:

• See entities in the Language Understanding concepts article.

home page

An option in Composer's navigation pane and the start page of Composer.

intent

An intent is the task that the user wants to accomplish or the problem they want to solve. Intent recognition in Composer is its ability to determine what the user is requesting. This is accomplished by the recognizer using either Regular Expressions or LUIS. When an intent is detected from the user's input, an event is emitted which can be handled using the Intent recognized trigger. If the intent isn't recognized by any recognizers, another event is emitted which can be handled using the Unknown intent trigger.

Additional information:

• See intents in the Language Understanding concepts article.

language generation

Language generation is the process to produce meaningful phrases and sentences in the form of natural language. Language generation enables your bot to response to a user with human readable language.

Additional information:

• The Language generation concept article.

LG editor

Known as the response editor, this is a section of the Bot responses page. It's the editor where users can view and edit all the Language generation templates.

There's also an inline response editor in the authoring canvas where your Bot Responses for the selected trigger or action can be added or updated.

language understanding

Language understanding (LU) deals with how the bot handles users input and converts them into something that it can understand and respond to intelligently. It involves the use of a recognizer, such as the default recognizer or Orchestrator, along with utterances, intents, and entities.

Additional information:

• The Language understanding concept article.

Language Understanding (LUIS)

A recognizer type in Composer that enables you to extract intent and entities based on LUIS service.

Additional information:

• See how to use LUIS for language understanding in Composer.

local skill

A local skill is a skill that doesn't need to contain a skill manifest. It can be called and shared within the Composer environment without Azure App registration resources.

LU editor

A section of the User input page. It's the language understanding editor where users can view and edit all the Language understanding templates.

main dialog

The main dialog is the foundation of every bot created in Composer. There's only one main dialog and all other dialogs are children of it. It gets initialized every time your bot runs and is the entry point into the bot.

memory

A bot uses memory to store property values, in the same way that programming and scripting languages such as C# and JavaScript do. A bots memory management is contained within the following scopes: user, conversation, dialog and turn.

Additional information:

• See the conversation flow and memory concept article.

navigation pane

A section of the Composer window. It enables users to navigate to different parts of Composer.

Orchestrator

Orchestrator is an intent-only language recognition engine and recognizer. It provides a skill dispatching solution for the Bot Connector Service. Bots built using Composer or the Bot Framework SDK can use it.

Additional information:

• See Intent recognition with Orchestrator in Composer.

parent dialog

A parent dialog is any dialog that has one or more child dialogs, and any dialog can have zero or more child dialogs associated with it. A parent dialog can also be a child of another dialog.

prompt

Prompts refer to bots asking questions to users to collect information of various data types (e.g. text, numbers).

Additional information:

• Read more about prompts.

property

A property is a distinct value identified by a specific address. An address has two parts, the scope and name: scope.name. Some examples of typical properties in Composer could include: user.name, turn.activity, dialog.index, user.profile.age.

Additional information:

• Read more about property in the memory concept article.

properties pane

A section of the Create page where users can edit properties.

QnA Maker

A cloud-based natural language processing service that easily creates a natural conversational layer over your data. Bot Framework Composer integrates QnA Maker knowledge base creation and management in addition to the existing LUIS integration for language understanding.

Additional information:

• See the What is the QnA Maker service article.

QnA knowledge base

QnA Maker imports your content into a knowledge base of question and answer pairs. After you publish your knowledge base, a client application such as a chat bot can send a user's question to your endpoint. Your QnA Maker service processes the question and responds with the best answer. Users can create and manage their QnA Maker knowledge bases within the context of the Composer environment.

Additional information:

• See how to create a QnA Maker knowledge base in Composer).

recognizer

A recognizer enables your bot to understand and extract meaningful pieces of information from user's input. There are currently two types of recognizers in Composer: LUIS and Regular Expression, both emit events which are handled by [triggers](#trigger].

regular expression

A regular expression is a sequence of characters that define a search pattern. Regex provides a powerful, flexible, and efficient method for processing text. The extensive pattern-matching notation of regex enables your bot to quickly parse large amounts of text to find specific character patterns that can be used to determine user intents, validate text to ensure that it matches a predefined pattern (such as an email address or ZIP Codes), or extract entities from utterances.

remote skill

A remote skill is a skill that contains a skill manifest and is published to a remote host, such as Azure.

response editor

This is where you can add or make updates to your .lg templates.

See also:

• Language Generation
• Bot responses page
• LG editor

root bot

A root bot is the first and the main bot that is created in your bot's project.

root dialog

See main dialog.

scope

When a property is in scope, it's visible to your bot. See memory concept article to know more about the different scopes of memory.

skill

A skill is a bot that can perform a set of tasks for another bot.

• See the Skills overview article.

skill consumer

A skill consumer is a bot that can invoke one or more skills.

Additional information:

• See the Skills overview article.

skill manifest

A skills manifest is a JSON file that describes the actions the skill can perform, its input and output parameters, and the skill's endpoints.

• See the Skills overview article.

title bar

A horizontal bar at the top of the Composer window, bearing the name of the product and the name of current bot project.

toolbar

A horizontal bar under Title bar in the Composer screen. It's a strip of icons used to perform certain actions to manipulate dialogs, triggers, and actions.

trigger

Triggers are the main component of a dialog and let you catch and respond to events. Each trigger has a condition and a collection of actions to execute when the condition is met.

Additional information:

• See events and triggers concept article.
• See how to define triggers article.

trigger phrase

In Composer, trigger phrases are example utterances that users define with a LUIS recognizer or a regular expression recognizer. Composer's language processing examines a user's utterance to determine the intent and extract any entities it may contain. A trigger phrase in LUIS is generally referred to as an utterance. A trigger phrase in a regular expression is generally referred to as a pattern.

User input page

An option in Composer's navigation pane. The User input page is a central way to manage language understanding .lu resources. From there, users can view all the .lu templates and edit them.

utterance

An utterance can be thought of as a continuous fragment of speech that begins and ends with a clear pause. Composer's language processing examines a user's utterance to determine the intent and extract any entities it may contain.

Additional information:

• See utterances in the Language Understanding concepts article.