Microsoft introduces new features for its Skype Bot platform

Microsoft has integrated new features to chatbots comprising Bing services, visual cards, and group chats. The company states that more than 30,000 developers are building bots on the Microsoft’s Skype Bot platform.

A report by PCMag points out that Microsoft recently announced that it is boosting bot development a bit by adding a few more features to the platform, including the ability for bots to participate in group conversations.

“Since the Skype Bot Platform was announced at Build in March, we’ve had over 30,000 developers start building bots,” Lilian Rincon, Group Program Manager at Skype mentioned in her blog post. “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,” she added.

The company will now allow bots to interact with users via cards, images, and other graphics. Skype bots can also allow users to check into third-party services within conversations. Microsoft has brought together the Skype Bot developer tools and the Microsoft Bot Framework into one environment which they call, the Microsoft Bot Framework “V3”. It added, "You can start developing using the new SDK today and test it using the emulator or the developer version of the Skype Web App. You will be able to publish bots built using the new API when Skype apps supporting the new features are released for desktop and mobile platforms in a few weeks."