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  3. Azure Bot Services

Azure Bot Services

A managed service purpose-built for bot development

Build conversational experiences for your customers

Develop intelligent, enterprise-grade bots that help you to enrich the customer experience while maintaining control of your data. Build any type of bot – from a Q&A bot to your own branded virtual assistant – to quickly connect your users to the answers they need.

Build healthcare-specific conversational AI experiences using Azure Health Bot

Create a bot that can naturally interact with users by easily integrating Cognitive Services

Use open-source SDK and tools to build, test and publish your bot to Azure

Deploy your bot to popular channels, wherever your customers interact

Create your own branded virtual assistant using solution accelerators

Easily add natural language and speech to your bot

Integrate powerful AI capabilities with Azure Cognitive Services to keep pace with technological advances without machine learning experience. Improve experiences by giving your users the ability to interact with your bot using natural language and speech capabilities.

Learn how

Start simple and grow in sophistication

Build with an open and extensible bot framework that enables you to build a basic informational bot to alleviate the high volume of common enquiries from your users. Then, as your scenarios become more nuanced, create more advanced bots, including virtual assistants that can handle rich, multiturn conversations that make it easier to engage with your users.

Get code samples on GitHub

Reach your customers, wherever they interact

Integrate Bot Services across multiple communication channels to reach more customers, more often. Apply bots to channels including your website or apps, Microsoft Teams, Skype, Slack, Cortana and Facebook Messenger.

Learn more about connecting to popular channels

Your assistant, your brand, your data

Deliver personalised experiences to customers without compromising ownership and control of customer data. Deploy a virtual assistant tailored to your brand, across multiple apps and devices, with the Virtual Assistant solution accelerator.

Start building your branded virtual assistant

Extend your bots with skills

Whether you’re starting with Bot Services or Power Virtual Agents, extend your bot with an open-source bot framework SDK and collaborate with business users to bring their ideas to life.

Learn more

Seamlessly transition conversations with customers from bot to human agent

Create a sophisticated bot to identify when to bring in a human agent. For common scenarios including customer escalations and help desk triage, your bot can interpret customer sentiment and intent with Azure Cognitive Services such as Text Analytics and Language Understanding.

Incorporate human handoff

Create a bot using Azure Bot Services

Create a new bot resource

Fill in required information

Develop your bot and connect it to channels

Step 1 of 1

Step 1: Create a new bot resource

  • Create a free Azure account
  • In the Azure portal, click Create a resource, then type “bot” and select Web App Bot

Step 1 of 1

Step 2: Fill in required information

  • Enter a bot name, select a region closest to your customers (for example, West US) and an F0 free pricing tier.
  • Click on Bot Template. Select SDK v4. Choose between C# and Node.js.
  • Choose the Basic Bot template to enable natural language understanding.
  • Once your bot has been provisioned after a few minutes, you will receive a notification in the top-right corner.

Step 1 of 1

Step 3: Develop your bot and connect it to channels

  • Click on the Build tab. Select Download Bot source code to download the source code for development in Visual Studio.
  • Note that we also offer Bot Builder SDK & tools for local bot development
  • Once finished developing, right-click on your project in Visual studio and click Publish.
  • Go to the Channels tab to expose your bot in Skype, Slack, Facebook Messenger and other popular channels.

Azure Bot Services pricing

Bot Service is a managed bot development service that helps you connect easily to your users via popular channels. Only pay for messages delivered using the Premium channel.

Get pricing details

A Developer’s Guide to Building AI Applications

Learn how to create your first conversational application with Bot Framework

Built with Azure Bot Services

La Liga built its own branded voice assistant to boost fan engagement with billions across multiple digital channels.

"We're letting the sporting world know that LaLiga is all about innovation and that being on the leading edge is an essential part of our brand identity."

Minerva Santana, Director of Innovation and Global Development LaLiga
LaLiga

Progressive customers make smarter insurance decisions with “Flo” bot

"One of the great things about Bot Service is that, out of the box, we could use it to quickly put together the basic framework for our bot."

Matt White, Marketing Manager, Personal Lines Acquisition Experience, Progressive Insurance
Progressive

Telefonica natural language-based digital assistant successfully deployed

"We used Azure Bot Service and Cognitive Services to help cope with the complexity of launching Aura in six countries, on four separate channels, and doing it all seamlessly."

Chema Alonso, Chief Data Officer, Telefonica
Telefonica

UPS paves the way for better service with faster development and AI

"Within five weeks, we had developed a chatbot prototype with the Microsoft Bot Framework…. Our chief information and engineering officer loved it and asked that we get a version into production in just two months…and that's just what we did."

Kumar Athreya, Senior Applications Development Manager of Shipping Systems, UPS
UPS

Adobe chatbot reduces friction for customers learning new technologies

Adobe

The BBC innovates how it delivers trusted news and entertainment with its own voice assistant, Beeb

"Azure offers us the flexibility and control we needed to create a natural, branded voice assistant while maintaining the necessary privacy for our customers' data."

Jeremy Walker: Head of Technology Transformation, BBC
BBC

Start building now

Build a QnA bot.

Create an enterprise bot.

Build your own branded virtual assistant.

Developer resources

Bot Framework SDK, tools and docs

Visit our GitHub BotBuilder repository for documentation, a rich set of samples, a downloadable SDK, an emulator and tools for bot development.

Bot Services and QnA Maker learning modules

Explore training to build intelligent bots that interact naturally with users using a range of services.

Community and support

Ask questions and get support from Microsoft engineers and the open-source Bot Framework community on Gitter and StackOverflow.

Bot Services documentation

See all documentation.

Frequently asked questions about Azure Bot Services

  • Bot Framework is comprised of an open-source SDK and tools for end-to-end bot development. Microsoft Azure Bot Services help you manage, connect and deploy your bot across devices and popular channels.
  • Bot Framework V4 SDK builds on developer feedback and learnings from prior Bot Framework SDKs. This version introduces enhanced levels of abstraction while enabling rich componentisation of the bot building blocks. You can start with a simple bot and grow your bot in sophistication using a modular and extensible framework. Get more details.
  • We plan to make improvements to the Bot Framework and add more channels incrementally. To suggest a specific channel to be added to the framework, contact us.
  • Yes, you can host your bot anywhere on the Internet, on your own servers, in Azure or in any data centre. Note: Your bot must expose a publicly accessible HTTPS endpoint.

Ready when you are – let’s set up your Azure free account.