As some of you may have noticed, Fuse Labs has been doing a lot of thinking about and work on conversational user experiences. Today, Microsoft released the public preview of the Microsoft Bot Framework. In the spirit of One Microsoft, the Bot Framework is a collaborative effort across many teams, including Microsoft Technology and Research, Microsoft’s Applications and Services Group and Microsoft’s Developer Experience teams. The framework provides just what developers need to build and connect intelligent bots that interact naturally wherever users are talking, from text/sms to Skype, Slack, Office 365 mail and other popular services.
Bots (or conversation agents) are rapidly becoming an integral part of one’s digital experience – they are as vital a way for users to interact with a service or application as is a web site or a mobile experience. Developers writing bots all face the same problems: bots require basic I/O; they must have language and dialog skills; and they must connect to users – preferably in any conversation experience and language the user chooses. The Bot Framework provides tools to easily solve these problems and more for developers e.g., automatic translation to more than 30 languages, user and conversation state management, debugging tools, an embeddable web chat control and a way for users to discover, try, and add bots to the conversation experiences they love.
The Bot Framework consists of three main components: The Bot builder SDK, Channels, and the Bot Framework Directory.
We hope you take the Bot Framework for a spin – you can try some of the Sample Bots from Microsoft Build 2016 today by visiting the Bot Directory.
Happy making. And chatting.
Colleen Estrada from the Bot Framework Team