Microsoft recently gifted Skype chatbots with new features, and developers can get a taste of them using Microsoft's Bot Framework.
The most notable upgrade is that Skype chatbots are now group-chat ready, meaning that they are able to reply to messages coming from more than one user in the same chat window.
This can make the Skype bot framework resemble the group experience from Slack. What is more, chatbots can make use of cards for sharing images with buttons, receipts and carousels.
Skype has collaborated with Bing to showcase a preview of Bing Entity and Intent detection so that natural language understanding is built right into Skype Bots-an industry first," The company said in a blog post”.
At this year’s Build conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared the company’s vision of a future in which artificial intelligence (AI) such as Cortana would work with bots, programmed to perform specific tasks.
According to Mr. Nadella, intelligent assistants and bots are most likely to team up in the future to assist humans to perform mundane tasks such as ordering food, booking flights and making hotel reservations.