It has been seen that Microsoft is trying to push for development of chatbot or bots. On Friday, it was observed that the company had announced new features such as group chat functionality, visual cards, and for its Skype Bot Platform they announced third-party service sign-in. It was also announced by the company, that to create a single entity called Microsoft Bot Framework V3 they had merged Skype Bot developer tools and Microsoft Bot Framework. Microsoft’s latest update states that Skype Bot Platform has around 30,000 developers, which was announced back in March.
Apart from presenting users with visual cards such as images and carousels, bots for group conversations can be made by developers with the help of the update to the Skype Bot Platform. The new framework allows users without leaving Skype to sign into another service to complete transactions and bookings. It also allows authentication for third-party services. The company said in its blog post that Skype Bots will now also be able to provide you with a receipt of the items that you purchased recently. Microsoft also said that natural language abilities of Skype Bots have also been boosted using the Bing framework.
The company said in a blog post that Skype has collaborated with Bing to showcase a preview of Bing Entity and Intent detection so that natural language understanding is built right into Skype Bots-an industry first. The company also said that from Friday itself, the developers have had access to all the new features within the new bot framework. As long as the new SDK is available, developers will only be able to publish their revamped bots after compatible Skype applications are rolled out the desktop and mobile platforms in a “few weeks.” Earlier this month shortly after the Messenger bot updates from Facebook was made, Microsoft’s announcement was heard. To allow users to respond to messages quickly Facebook also added a feature called quick replies.
