Azure Bot Service, Other Offerings Ease Bot Building

• Bots are digital agents that can respond to natural language user requests, potentially simplifying the user interfaces of applications and services.
• The Azure Bot Service speeds bot deployment on Azure, assists with publishing and managing bots, and could reduce costs associated with running bots.
• Several offerings reduce upfront work required to implement bots while leveraging hosted services.

The Azure Bot Service hosts bots created using the Microsoft Bot Framework, which is a set of tools and APIs and a portal for bot development. The service could make it feasible for organizations to implement bots, but the various technologies and stakeholders required could complicate the process.

Service Benefits

Bots can serve as front ends to application and service functionality and, in some cases, replace human agents who are currently required for such purposes. For example, bots could accept orders, make reservations, and look up product prices or sales figures.

The Bot Framework enables developers to build bots from scratch and adapt existing bot code into the framework. Bots that use the framework can be made accessible through several so-called channels (communication platforms), such as Skype for Business, Office 365 e-mail, Teams, SMS text messaging, and Slack. The framework SDK is open source software and can be used with C#, JavaScript (with Node.js), Java, or Python code.