Azure Bot Service Plugin 1.3.0 Released

[Arsen Chaloyan]

Microsoft Azure Bot Service (ABS) Plugin 1.3.0 to the UniMRCP Server (UMS) has been released.

The plugin is based on the following components:

• UniMRCP Server 1.7.0
• Azure Speech SDK 1.20.0

The plugin supports the following APIs:

• LUIS
• Bot Service via Direct Line Speech

The binaries are currently available for the following Linux distributions:

• Red Hat / CentOS 8 (unimrcp-azure-bot-1.7.3-1.el8.x86_64.rpm)
• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (unimrcp-azure-bot_1.7.3-bionic_amd64.deb)
• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (unimrcp-azure-bot_1.7.3-focal_amd64.deb)

This release introduces support for sending and getting activities triggered by the client application in addition to the regular listen method. The release also fixes a few problems by making use of the latest Speech SDK.

The detailed list of changes introduced in this release follows.

New Features

• Added support for different DSC methods such as 'listen', 'send-activity' and 'get-activity'.
• Allow the client to specify an activity payload via vendor-specific parameters such as 'payload', 'payload-encoding', 'payload-text'.
• In addition to 'tag-format', added a new configuration parameter 'tag-encoding'.
• Added support for the SDK properties InitialSilenceTimeout and EndSilenceStimeout.

Fixed Problems

• Store submitted audio data into a wav file, when collection of utterances is enabled.
• Reworked processing of STOP requests and input completion events.
• If interim OnRecognizing events are not delivered, send START-OF-INPUT event upon processing OnRecognze event.
• If an activity is not received within the specified activity timeout, complete recognition with no-match.

Configuration Parameters

• Added a new attribute 'event-input-text' to the element 'results'. The attribute defaults 'null'.
• Added a new attribute 'tag-encoding' to the element 'results'. The attribute defaults to 'escaped'.
• Added a new attribute 'activity-timeout' to the element 'streaming-recognition'. The attribute defaults to 5000 msec.
• Added new attributes 'initial-silence-timeout' and 'end-silence-timeout' to the element 'streaming-recognition'. The attributes default to 0 msec (not set).

Miscellaneous

• Upgraded Azure Speech SDK from 1.14.0 to 1.20.0.
• Updated the Usage Guide to reflect the changes introduced in this release.

Reference

• LUIS
  
• Azure Bot Service
  

Visit the Azure Bot Service plugin page for more information.

• https://unispeech.io/azbot
  
• https://www.unimrcp.org/azbot
  

Thank you for using UniMRCP.

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Arsen Chaloyan
Author of UniMRCP
http://www.unimrcp.org