Microsoft's next big bot play: bringing bots to Bing

Microsoft laid out its plans for chat bots at last year’s Build conference. The company has been making some huge investments on bots lately, especially with the chat bots that are available on Skype. At this year’s Build, Microsoft is going to take chat bots a step further.

Redmond is working on integrating chat bots to Bing.com, allowing users to help from intelligent chatbots whenever they search for something. By default, Microsoft will have some of its own intelligent chatbots that were built using its Bot Framework, but developers will also be able to use the Bot Framework to bring their own chat bots to Bing.com. The chatbots work via Microsoft’s Skype service, which actually got bots integration several months ago.

One of the chat bots that’s currently being tested by Microsoft is the InfoBot. Whenever you search a question or something similar, InfoBot will show a handy button under the featured answer. From there, you can start a conversation with the InfoBot and ask it more questions about your query. The InfoBot actually connects with Wikipedia to find the answers to your query. The chat bot flyouts look a lot like how Facebook Messenger’s bots work on Facebook.com:

Microsoft is testing a variety of other different chat bots on Bing.com at the moment. These bots will help you find things like restaurants near you, movie times, and more. However, it should be interesting to see how Microsoft plans on letting third-party developers bring their custom bots to Bing.com. We are told that Microsoft will reveal more about chat bots on Bing.com at Build 2017 next week, which we will be covering live from Seattle.