Public Preview: Azure Communication Services Chat for Bot Framework
Published date: February 15, 2023
Azure Communication Services Chat for Bot Framework is now in public preview. This new capability enables developers to connect their conversational bots built on Azure Bot Service to Azure Communication Services Chat. This new functionality will be especially helpful in customer support scenarios where bots can provide the first line of support rather than live agents. The key use cases addressed are:
Reduce time to resolution by enabling users to be greeted by bots and address frequently asked questions before doing a handoff to an agent. This reduces time for your staff to take care of more queries by having bot do some of the work for you.
Meet customers outside of your normal business hours to enhance customer satisfaction by providing 24/7 support for inquiries about products, store hours, orders, returns etc. either on a website or a mobile app. If, for some reason customers need to reach you, the bot can take the customer’s details and relay the question back to you to address during business hours.
Build AI powered smart chat experiences leveraging other Azure services such as Azure Notification hub to send push notifications to mobile users for missed messages or Azure Cognitive services to perform sentiment analysis.
To learn more check out the Microsoft Bot Framework Overview or the Azure Communications Services QuickStart to add bot to Chat channels.
For more details on these changes and any others, feel free to review our Release Notes or Documentation.