Since the Skype Bot Platform was announced at Build in March we’ve had over 30,000 developers start building bots. Today we’re excited to announce some great new features for bot developers with the latest update of the Microsoft Bot Framework.
Groups
Make Skype Bots that are more productive—or just entertaining—for groups of users. Bots can now be a part of and respond to group conversations.
Cards
Create visual cards for compelling user to bot interactions with image cards, carousels, and receipts.
Carousel card – Hero card – Receipt card
Natural Language
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.
Third-party authentication
Connect users to your service by having them sign in right on a card. This means they authorize their credentials once and continue to enjoy their bot experience without further interruptions.
Your bots–wherever your users are talking
Microsoft has brought together the Skype Bot Platform and the Microsoft Bot Framework into one environment.
Using the Microsoft Bot Framework you can publish your bot to Skype, and submit for promotion in the Skype and Microsoft bot directories, as well as get access to great bot building tools.
Starting today, developers have access to all these new features within the new framework. To learn more about them and how to update your existing bot using the Microsoft Bot Framework, go here.
We’re listening to all your feedback and would love to know what you think.
To learn more about the Microsoft Research team, check out their Bot Framework blog.