Introduced at the recent Build 2016 event, Microsoft’s Bot Framework offers a complete set of development and deployment services for building and hosting conversational agents.

In an interview with Business Insider’s Matt Rosoff, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emphasized several requirements for effective bots. For one thing, they need to function independently from any specific operating system. Microsoft is positioning their Bot Framework as a platform where developers can build bots to run in many different environments and across services such as Facebook, Slack, and Line.

Nadella also noted that effective bots need to be proactive, or even anticipatory. Nadella provided the example of a bot that senses a person will be late to a meeting and, without prompting, reschedules the meeting and notifies the participants. Nadella foresees bot developers leveraging Microsoft’s “rich cognitive services,” such as enterprise knowledge stores within the Azure cloud, to give bots these types of insights.

So how mature and effective is the Bot Framework? It looks like the underpinnings are all there. There are a few instructions and some code samples on GitHub for basic question and answer bots. There’s also a sample for a bot that can capture items in a to-do list. The Framework uses Microsoft’s Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) for natural language understanding support.

The Bot Framework is geared towards developers experienced in either Node.js or C#. If you’re a mobile developer or a product manager with a mobile development team, now would be a good time to start experimenting with the Bot Framework to get a head start. The first several bots you build will probably take a considerable effort. But my guess is that developers and communities will be building out blocks of reusable conversational code for others to leverage in the near future.

If you don’t have access to a strong development team, but you have an app or service that you’d like to integrate with a conversational bot, there are other platforms that might be better suited to your needs. Platforms such as api.ai have you focus on mapping possible inputs to outputs and actions, rather than coding interactions from scratch. Unlike Microsoft’s Bot Framework, these services require little to no programming expertise.

Increasingly, we will be engaging with smart services embedded in the things around us. Conversational bots offer the natural interface to this world of smart things, because they can run on any operating system within any device or service layer. Microsoft seems to be in the right place at the right time with their all encompassing Bot Framework.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Microsoft, intelligent Assistants, chatbots, Bot Framework