Hey!

Last week I presented at DevFest Caribbean. It was a Google Developer Group event, where the GDG of multiple regions came together, it involved the groups from Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Jamaica and others. There were some really good presentations, and you can check them out here.

My presentation focused on virtual agents I created in Microsoft Teams. I demonstrated a messaging extension from Microsoft, that I extended to work with BambooHR’s platform.

Exercise is a big deal at Teleios. So, when Geon demonstrated his Power App, it inspired me to make a virtual agent to help with updating. In my presentation, I showed a bot that uploads data for access to the Power App … plus, it pushes updates to Strava!

The Ministry of Planning has a website for checking air quality in T&T. I wrote an API to talk to that site and then a bot that works in Teams directly. The bigger challenge in this agent was getting something, anything really, up and running on my google home mini. And I did! So, I was very glad.

Finally, I’ve started experimenting with virtual agents that can interact with in-progress meetings on Microsoft Teams. I heavily relied on the Microsoft Graph samples library related to accessing meetings. I got a zany bot to work. It can inject audio into live meetings, without anyone having to share media from their devices. It’s great for sound effects, like a play off sound for people who are taking up too much time in a meeting.

All told, presenting at DevFest was fun, yet again. It was my third time presenting, and third year in a row talking about conversational user interfaces. You can catch the whole talk here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4MZkMn5fcc