To test bots locally, you will need to download and install the Bot Framework Emulator from Microsoft. Installation instructions and links to documentation can be found on the GitHub page at https://github.com/microsoft/BotFramework-Emulator.

Next, you will need to install the dependencies. For this project, we are using Python and we have a requirements file. To install the requirements, clone the GitHub repo for this book and navigate to the Ch7/SmartBot folder. Then, enter the following pip install script:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

This will install the Bot Framework components in addition to Flask, the web server platform that our bot will use, and async.io, an asynchronous library.