Microsoft updates its bot platforms

Microsoft originally announced the Skype Bot Platform in March at the company's Build developer conference. As of July 8, Microsoft officials said 30,000 developers are building building bots for its platforms. As part of the updates to the Skype Bot Platform, Microsoft added groups support so that bots can now be part of group conversations. Skype Bots now also can take advantage of visual image cards, carousel cards, and receipt cards. The team also is working on single sign-in directly on cards, resulting in users having to authorize their credentials one time only.

Skype is working with Bing to enable natural language understanding to be built directly into Skype Bots via Bing Entity and Intent detection. Microsoft's Bot Framework platform added support for Microsoft's Cognitive Services intent dialog in July.

Using the Microsoft Bot Framework, developers can publish their bots to Skype and submit them for promotion in the Skype and Microsoft bot directories, officials said in Friday's blog post.

Other updates this month to the Microsoft Bot Framework platform include support for Skype calling, Slack buttons, and various Facebook bot features.