Microsoft Announces Azure Bot Service, Industry’s First Cloud Bot-as-a-Service

Microsoft today announced the Azure Bot Service, a first cloud Bot-as-a-Service in the industry. Using Azure Bot service, developers can accelerate the development of bots with the Microsoft Bot Framework and easily deploy and manage them on Azure. Since Bots run on Azure Functions, a serverless environment, so they scale based on demand and developers will have to pay only for the resources their bots consume.

Azure Bot Service features:

Accelerated development: Speed up development by working in an integrated environment that’s purpose-built for bot development. Get started in seconds with out-of-the-box templates including basic bot, Language Understanding Intelligent Service bot, form bot, and proactive bot. Microsoft Bot Framework is built into each template to streamline your workflow.

Continuous delivery: Use your own tool chain and commit your code to popular source control systems such as Visual Studio Team System, GitHub, and Bitbucket, and then automatically publish your code into Azure.

Broader reach: Increase your interactions and reach to more customers from your website or app to email, GroupMe, Facebook Messenger, Kik, Skype, Slack, Teams, Telegram, text/SMS, and Twilio.

Boosted bot intelligence: Add the smarts to your bots with a few lines of code. Add Cognitive Services to enable your bots to see, hear, interpret, and interact in more human ways. Developers can connect to other Azure services to enrich their bots. For example, use Azure Search to create sophisticated search capabilities to your bots.

Operational agility: Scale up or down on demand. As your bots grow in popularity, you only pay for what you use. You don’t have to reserve resources, and you are only charged for the number of executions and resources consumed.

Learn more about it here.