So Microsoft wants to make it easy for developers to build bots that work within its ecosystem (and Slack)... will this be another standards play? They're certainly out ahead of Facebook's F8 — and Apple and Google. But does Microsoft have the credibility to be the kingmaker in the #ConvComm/AI/bot/assistant market?
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@chrismessina Microsoft is making the right strategic move here by making the framework work across platforms. They certainly have a lot to prove, but their is little downside risk for msft and a lot of upside for users.
Thanks all.
So far we've been working with Howdy and Slack folks (and hopefully Chris and others:- ) to make tools for making and connecting bots, which work across apps and platforms.
You should check out our bot builder on GitHub https://github.com/Microsoft/Bot... and give us feedback or just join in or let us know how be better.
In some way, bots have been around forever and are just microformats + Natural Language and conversation.
In another sense, making a good bot isn't as easy as it seems.
Amir from Slack, wroteup a nice rulebook https://medium.com/slack-develop... on their learnings. So the social norms are still in flux and we are learning.
@ Microsoft Research we have APis and tools to help people with natural language processing and other intelligent services. For example, just making your bot have short term conversational memory, so it remembers what you said and can reason over it, is very tricky. Many of our intelligent apis can be found here https://www.microsoft.com/cognit...
We really are working hard to make sure that bots don't become trapped in each silo-ed app on each platform or in each browser, and from the beginning we work together to promote openness and interoperating systems. Otherwise developers will have a lot more tedious work to do, and there will be fewer good bots. We believe that this is a new frontier so are just diving in. its fun, and we're super open we'll learn as we go.
@chrismessina what'll be interesting to see is how much the results will be personal or trainable. When I think of search, I still tend to think of popularity or page rank. I'm more interested in intelligent agents that will return the most personalized or contextual results for me.
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I just love that bots are back! Very interesting move for Microsoft.
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