.lu files help describe language understanding components for your bot. LUDown is a command line tool that helps convert .lu file(s) into JSON files that you can then use to create your LUIS app or QnAMaker knowledge base.

Language Understanding (LUIS.ai) allows your application to understand what a person wants in their own words. LUIS uses machine learning to allow developers to build applications that can receive user input in natural language and extract meaning from it.

QnA Maker enables you to go from FAQ to bot in minutes. With QnA Maker you can build, train and publish a simple question and answer bot based on FAQ URLs, structured documents or editorial content in minutes.

The .lu file and the LUDown tool serve several use cases:

• Quick, simple and easy way to bootstrap language understanding for your bot.
• Describe intents, entities, utterances and patterns for your bot in simple markdown documents.
• The language understanding definition for your bot lives with the rest of your code. You can use other CLI tools like luis to create a new LUIS app using the .lu files.
• Group language understanding documents by language and locale to easily manage localization.
• Define question and answer pairs for your bot.
• Works in conjunction with other Microsoft Bot Builder tools, like LUIS CLI and QnAMaker CLI.

• Node.js version 8.5 or higher

To install:

npm i -g ludown

Checkout the examples folder for example .lu files.

Also see the here to add Small talk/ chit-chat capabilities to your bot.

• Ludown commands
• .lu File Format
• Creating LUIS JSON model file
• Creating QnA Maker KB model file
• Recreating .lu files with Refresh command
• Machine translating .lu files
• Adding small talk/ chit-chat capabilities to your bot

This CLI writes to stderr on error and stdout otherwise. CLI also returns the following codes based on the outcome of parsing.