This past November, Microsoft launched, what it is calling, the “Industry’s First Cloud Bot-as-a-Service” platform. Bots, and more specifically conversational apps, have been a very popular subject of late with both Amazon and Google also having recent deep learning announcements.
The Azure Bot Service is powered by the Microsoft Bot Framework and has a serverless compute back-end built on Azure Functions. Using the bot service allows developers to build conversational applications that plug into many popular chat applications including Slack, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Kik and Office 365.
