
Microsoft Bot Framework - ingve
https://dev.botframework.com/
======
hellcow
This is amazing news, and I'm really excited for the innovation this is going
to bring to the bot space.

As an alternative to this closed approach, I've been building an MIT-licensed
bot framework using Golang, enabling anyone to build advanced AI bots. The API
we've built seems to be a lot more robust than what Microsoft showed today.
[https://github.com/itsabot/abot](https://github.com/itsabot/abot)

It's still very early (too early for a ShowHN), but there's tons of
documentation and guides if you wanted to get your hands dirty before we do a
proper release.

~~~
illumin8
Why the downvotes? The bots Microsoft demonstrated today are tied to the Skype
client, which is a closed ecosystem. I'd much rather develop bots that are not
locked into a closed ecosystem, and can function across any chat provider that
supports XMPP.

~~~
manojlds
The BotBuilder is an Open source framework
([https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder](https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder))
to connect to Skype, Slack, Text, Office, Twitter and more.

~~~
illumin8
Thanks for that additional information - I didn't realize this was meant to be
more open. Slack support is welcome.

~~~
aalbertson
"Slack support is welcome"

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't slack a closed ecosystem, akin to Skype?

~~~
cloudhead
I think he means open as in supporting more than one platform.

~~~
NetStrikeForce
I actually think he means "open" as in "not Microsoft" :)

------
frik
This could be a huge deal. Hopefully, a general purpose bot API based on
JSON/etc is defined by W3C. In near future, bots will do a lot of time
consuming daily tasks, that at the moment you do yourself using the web
browser. I would rather not vendor-lock in myself. (sure natural language can
be used, but general purpose API that allows bots to exchange each other would
be more useful)

~~~
cobalt
ah, the W3C. Known for doing things well and in a timely manner

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Maybe it's time the W3C was replaced by a W3CO bot.

But yes - standards for this space would be a huge benefit.

I'm pretty impressed by the new Microsoft. I'm still concerned about
cost/stability/support, but it's been a while since Microsoft did something
that made me think it was worth a serious look - and bots, cognitive, and
Wubuntu definitely are.

------
ingve
The Bot Builder SDK is on GitHub:

[https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder](https://github.com/Microsoft/BotBuilder)

------
hydromet
Wow, amazing world progress, "hello world" has finally been deprecated in
favor of YAPOD (yet another pizza ordering demo). Quick, someone ping Ray
Kurzweil to alert him of the rise of pizza ordering chat bots comprised of
hidden Markov models, for the Singularity is surely near ;-)

------
vonklaus
why is this space so active? and why now?

there are a massive amount of bot & chatbot conpanies and it is a fairly
recent trend. Are we on the cusp of beating the turing test? the space is
exploding

~~~
miguelrochefort
The rise of AI lead people to think that conversation/speech is the future of
UI. Hence the bots.

The hype will die in a few years, as people will realize that natural language
is a terrible interface.

~~~
taneq
Or if not, it'll explain why in sci-fi movies, robots talk to each other in
English.

~~~
Intermernet
_" What I really need is a droid that understands the binary language of
moisture vaporators."_

 _" Vaporators? Sir, my first job was programming binary loadlifters—very
similar to your vaporators in most respects."_

~~~
taneq
Trope averted! Although he still talks to R2 in English despite being fluent
in over three billion languages.

------
swalsh
This combined with the 3 new bot management platforms showed from the latest
YC batch makes me think I should start learning a bit more about bots... seems
like they're coming pretty fast.

~~~
yeukhon
Can you list those three?

~~~
serg33v
i dont know about YC bots, i know those platforms: manybot.io, api.ai,
chatfuel, wit.ai

------
yoavm
From the Node.js Getting Started guide: "Test your bot (Windows Only)". Wait,
what?

* [http://docs.botframework.com/builder/node/overview/](http://docs.botframework.com/builder/node/overview/)

~~~
shimon_e
The Bot Builder emulator is a Windows only app.

------
marchenko
From the bot framework FAQ: "In order to provide the I/O service, the Bot
Connector collects and stores your ID from the service you used to contact the
bot. In turn the Bot Connector may additionally store anonymized conversation
content for service improvement purposes." Does this mean that MSFT is
collecting the chat data to improve its natural language understanding models?

~~~
ProAm
Yes, like every other company does today.

~~~
marchenko
I'm not surprised that they collect data, I'm just wondering what these
framework providers are competing for in this space.

~~~
ProAm
I think it's more of a collect everything now, and we can sort it later. NLP
would be the first guess for me too.

------
daveguy
Hah. Was Tay supposed to be the lead in to this release? I'm surprised they
went ahead with this after the Tay debacle.

~~~
arien
I think it made for a very strong and touching point when Nadella said they
want technology to bring the best of people, not the worst. So they were able
to use it in a way, even if it didn't go exactly as planned.

------
ciroduran
If you're into bots, but you aren't too keen into programming, there's this
website [http://cheapbotsdonequick.com/](http://cheapbotsdonequick.com/) that
allows you to set up a bot, either for text or SVG rendering, rather quickly.
It uses a framework called Tracery that implements a limited language that
expands upon symbols to create procedurally generated texts.

------
meher404
This is truly amazing, in the sense that now bot developers have multiple
channels to showcase their bot. There are tons of great bots already out
there, but with a framework from Microsoft will bring all such bots to main
stream. (Much like what Slack wants to be, but it is no match to the scale of
Microsoft)

Chatbots('fuzzy command lines'-basch) actually have a really cool property,
you can stack them up together. Example: You can take a Picture captioning bot
and an Instagram bot, and upload the Pic with a caption automatically . (I
know its a stupid example, but you get the drift rite?!) What is really cool
is that, Microsoft with this platform will have access to all kinds of bots
that do specific tasks. Mixing and matching these small tasks can create
magical experiences. So in a sense Microsoft is crowd sourcing its way to
create the Artificial General Intelligence through this platform. Will be
interesting to see, if they plug Cortana with these bots and make it more
powerful. Exiting times!

------
nv-vn
This is awesome, but I wonder how useful it would actually be to use. I
imagine the functionality is going to be limited to only the features shared
among each platform (which is just text messaging? Unless by SMS they mean MMS
also). The other problem I see with it is that they've implemented it in two
languages simultaneously, but there's no common code between the two because
there's no simple way to link the two languages together. I think a better
solution might be to create this as a whole API layer over the other bots
where you could gain:

\- A single API key to keep track of, and they automatically handle keys for
the other platforms

\- Less connections to handle, just read all the messages from a single queue
and tell the API which one you're replying to

\- Common backend code that could be shared between both C# and
TypeScript/Node, as well as other languages that could be added in the future.
For example, Python, Perl, or Ruby are extremely popular for
IRC/Slack/Telegram bots and it would be nice to have a common API for some of
those languages.

------
mwcampbell
I wonder if it would be feasible to hook this up to Amazon's Alexa Skills Kit
so these bots can be used from the Amazon Echo and similar devices.

~~~
tonylucas
It's not easily possible yet (no API access to ASK) but I find it hard to
believe Amazon don't have similar plans in this area.

~~~
jedberg
Considering Amazon is the registrar for .bot, I'm sure they have plans. :)

[https://nic.bot](https://nic.bot)

------
nickysielicki
Build 2016 has been pretty damn impressive on this first day.

And this coming from someone who hasn't touched Windows in years and doesn't
intend to.

------
sp332
This reminds me strongly of "agents" that were going to do your bidding, as
prophesied in the early 90's. Here's video of Douglas Adams and Tim Baker
giving a tour of the future.
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=1iAJPoc23-M](https://youtube.com/watch?v=1iAJPoc23-M)

~~~
Intermernet
How did I not know that existed? I love both Douglas Adams and Tom Baker (and
once met Douglas at Sydney University and was literally dumb-founded).

It's typically prescient for Douglas, and I feel even more sorry that he's not
around today to enjoy, and shape the way technology has progressed.

Now I'm melancholy... Time to re-read some Dirk Gently!

------
facepalm
I'm still not sure what these Bot frameworks provide? Here the main point
might be their natural language processing, but they don't elaborate on it
much. What is an example of a useful bot that one could create with it?
Assuming that I already know how to program something like ELIZA?

~~~
tonylucas
Different frameworks provide different pieces, a non exhaustive list:

Front end integrations (Slack, Skype etc) NLP Conversation state and context
management Automated knowledge/learning.

etc etc.

I'm in the middle of writing a blog post on this, but
[https://medium.com/point-nine-news/software-
bots-c56aeedcfec...](https://medium.com/point-nine-news/software-
bots-c56aeedcfec3#.ye1z2am6u) is a good piece to read

------
TY
This is a very welcome development. The Bot Framework and Connector take care
of lots of plumbing that bot developers otherwise would have to develop and
run themselves and would (theoretically) allow developers focus on what their
bots valuable.

All of this under MIT license - thank you, Microsoft!

------
phodo
Get ready for "There's a bot for that!" to hit mainstream media...

I just went through the keynote. Microsoft has always done well with developer
tools, going all the way back to Visual Basic, and prior. I think this is no
different, and indeed has a lot of potential. What struck me most about the
overall framework was a) simplicity in concept b) open-ness c) tools, e.g.
heuristics to machine learning / training UI to human intervention, plus
api's.

On a broader note, I am liking this new/newer Microsoft's innovation and
openminded push.

------
infocollector
Can this be run without an internet connection?

~~~
frik
Of course not, it's an open SDK that connects to their cloud service. Sadly
Google killed Freebase and Wikidata is several magnitudes smaller, so an open
source alternative isn't available - although it would allow you offline
usage, no spying and no vendor lock-in. (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent)
,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_personal_assistant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_personal_assistant)
)

------
foota
I wonder if this was supposed to be led into from the release of their very
failed bot the other day.

------
jsingleton
This is pretty interesting. It used to be a pain to automate Skype. They
deprecated a key API and it was hard to stop the client auto updating. I got
GitHub's Hubot working with it eventually but it wasn't trivial.

------
partycoder
After the tay.ai fiasco I would be reluctant to represent a company with such
bots.

------
Hortinstein
Neal Stephenson must be smiling[0]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line)

------
itsyogesh
What is the recommended reading (learning) for someone who is just starting
out with AI based bots? I understand that a basic Machine Learning course is
required, but what else?

------
martijn_himself
It would be interesting to see if Microsoft will publish a way of integrating
this with Lync. I would expect that to be quite high on the agenda.

~~~
douche
It probably would not be an impossible task to write a UCMA backend for the
API - although that would limit you to on-premise deployments of Lync, since
they still haven't gotten around to releasing a version of UCMA that could
authenticate with Lync Online/Office 365.

------
zavi
[http://i.imgur.com/2S4qiKO.png](http://i.imgur.com/2S4qiKO.png)

Sigh...

------
Animats
Oh, I thought this was a framework for developing botnets. It's more like
phone tree hell for the web.

------
cwe
The return of text adventures! How is typing out a request any better than
tapping a button? Isn't the magic of AI in predicting a button press, rather
than making us write out or speak the request?

~~~
cdnsteve
Would you rather using Bash/command line or buttons? Some people prefer text
for control and not an interface.

~~~
cwe
Some people, sure, but the vast majority that all this hype and investment
would suggest? I'm skeptical.

~~~
sp332
Because I don't want to hunt around for which of 10,000 buttons to press when
I can just type what I want.

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vit05
Message app + Bot will change search forever.

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kbart
I suspect this technology is out for a while, because I can't attribute most
of the calls to various tech-support centers to the intelligent human being.

------
nthcolumn
hawaiian

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dandigangi
No more Tay please Microsoft! Haha

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blairanderson
microsoft is hella good at making bots these days.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+tay+bot](https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+tay+bot)

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elcapitan
I first thought this was a parody. But maybe it's just one of their bots,
posting parodies and marketing them as Microsoft products now?

~~~
elcapitan
Oh their downvote bots are also quite active.

------
gravypod
"With each purchase get a chance to win the secret neo-Nazi mode!"

