The Microsoft Bot Framework is a flexible framework for building conversational bots. A bot can be written once and deployed to multiple channels including webchat, Microsoft Teams, Alexa and SMS. It supports text, speech and rich GUIs with images and controls.
In this three part series, I’ll register a ‘hello world’ bot application as an Azure Bot Resource and then look at how to customise my bot behaviours. Finally I’ll make it available to a chat widget on a web page, SMS and consume it from a Node.js application.
In this part, I’ll register and configure a bot with Microsoft Azure Bot Service. It might seem odd to start here rather than going straight into the application code. However, getting this step out of the way gives us something simple to play with that works end to end.