Advantages

Developers benefit in the following way:

  1. Reach a broad set of users that are already chatting.
  2. More capable of supporting services like Azure Cognition, translation and history
  3. Build bots with Bot Builder SDK

They benefit business because:

  1. Reduced cost of development
  2. higher quality bots

Components of Microsoft Bot Framework

The bot framework has 3 components:

  1. Bot builder SDK
  2. Bot framework developer portal
  3. Bot directory

Lets talk about them one by one:

Bot Builder SDK

The bot builder SDK is available in Node.JS, .NET with lots of built in features like Dialogs, cards, Yes/No prompts, number choices, formflow etc. The SDK provides rich interaction with attachments like images and videos. There is a great support for services extension for Azure Cognitive Services like Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) as well. Along with SDK we get online and offline chat emulator for testing our bot.

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Bot Developer Portal

There is a new portal on dev.botframework.com from where you can :

  1. Register your bot
  2. Connect to Channels(Skype, messenger and lot more)
  3. Test the bot
  4. Publish the bot to the world
  5. Manage all of the bots in one place
  6. Measure the bot usage statistics
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dev.botframework.com
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Bot emulator

Bot Framework Emulator

  1. You can send requests and receive responses
  2. Inspect the JSON messages getting transferred.
  3. Simulate multiple Users
  4. or even emulate a specific user

Bot Directory

Bot directory is huge repo of bots made using Microsoft Bot Framework that you can immediately add to about a dozen different channels like messenger, skype, slack etc.

Microsoft Bot Framework is a very powerful platform that lets you create feature rich bots very quickly. With all the necessary tools for management, integration and testing together with rapidly growing market to easily publish to, it is something developers can use to create the bots of their dream.

Links:

Developer Portal : www.dev.botframework.com

Cognitive Services: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/