In an announcement at the recent Build Development Conference in San Francisco, USA, CEO Satya Nadella introduced Microsoft’s Bot Framework, which will be made available under an open source license. Bots, also known as chatbots or conversation agents, are gaining momentum as one of the standard ways for users to interact with apps & other software agents, especially on the Web or on mobile platforms. MS’s Bot Framework makes it easy & cheap for developers to integrate bot functionality into their offerings.
Bots depend on advances in AI tech & have been around for a long time. Text-based SmarterChild for AOL AIM & MS Messenger was the 1st to take off with the advent of the Web in the late 90s. Lately, the most notable bots have also included voice functionality & have been available on mobiles, most notably Siri on Apple’s iOS devices, Cortana on MS Windows & what is perhaps the most talked about bot of late: the Amazon Echo. The Echo experience is like you’re conversing with your house via its voice-based always on chatbot, “Alexa”, which you can query for basic info & ask it to take actions like queuing up particular songs or movies on your entertainment center or order stuff from Amazon.
Other tech powerhouses like Google, with enhancements to Google Now, & Facebook, have also announced plans for better AI-powered bots to supplement their product offerings. If that wasn’t enough, competition is heating up even more, & Microsoft really has to step it up a notch, with Amazon having just published an open source version of Echo, by releasing it on Github together with instructions on how to make a low cost bot with a Raspberry Pi.
Microsoft is building on its existing installed base of Windows clients, of which Cortana is an integral part. Right now Cortana is just another proprietary PC-based help tool & personal assistant, but since they’re releasing the MS Bot Framework for any developer to use freely, they hope that the framework’s built-in hooks into Cortana will popularize Microsoft’s chatbot & make of it a defacto industry standard. In fact, Cortana had already been made available on both iOS & Android platforms, & has built in compatibility with a wide range of other platforms & services, like telegram, Slack & SMS texting.
The fact that the Framework has been published on Github, the popular open source developer portal, rather than on its own, means that Microsoft is making a heavy push to attract 3rd party developers. It’s also gone beyond its own .NET development environment by allowing coding with Node.JS as well as on its own C# programming language. It really opens up the potential base of developers who can code around the Bot Framework & continues Microsoft’s push, since Satya Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer as CEO, to make Windows over into a cross-platform development platform.
A simple example that was demoed in the Build Conference centered on a Domino’s Pizza bot that autonomously processed orders from humans. This simple bot demonstrates what, to paraphrase Nadella, Microsoft wants to potentiate: “conversations as a platform”. He wants to let the power of human language pervade computing & to make it easy for a computing platform to mimic human contextual responses. Nadella thinks that this tech has the potential to have a profound impact, on the order of the introduction of the GUI, the web or touch computing.
Image Credit: Microsoft
•Share This•
