Microsoft Launches Bot Framework To Let Developers Build Their Own Chatbots (venturebeat.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report on VentureBeat: Microsoft today is introducing the Bot Framework, a new tool in preview to help developers build their own chatbots for their applications. Using this, anyone can create a text program that they can chat with. A BotBuilder software-development kit (SDK) is available on GitHub under an open-source MIT license. These bots can be implemented into a variety of applications, including Slack or Telegram or even email. "Bots are like new applications," Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella said. "And digital assistants are meta apps, or like the new browsers. And intelligence is infused into all of your interactions. That's the rich platform that we have." Microsoft will want to tread carefully.

Comments

Some functionality costs, though

[itsownreward]

I understand you have to pay if you don't want it built with the fascist module, for instance.

Re:Some functionality costs, though

[DaHat]

4Chan provides that for free however.

Re:Some functionality costs, though

[Aighearach]

I ran to github right away to look at the details, but I left at "Bots are stateless which helps them scale."

But since you're not a software person (obviously) I can inform you that the words "MIT license" above make your joke lame.

Re:Some functionality costs, though

[tuxgeek]

If only I had mod points .. The "Tay" Model
+5 Funny

Like this and like that

[future assassin]

And Windows 10 is like a new chaching$$$

What?!?

[c]

Fucking hell, Slashdot... April 1st is still a couple days away!

Re:What?!?

[msmash]

Heh.

Re:What?!?

[Beat The Odds]

LOL I read the headline as "Microsoft Launches Fembots...."

Re:What?!?

[Locke2005]

It would be the first product Microsoft made that DIDN'T suck!!!

Re:What?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

woosh

Re:What?!?

[zlives]

hahahahahahahahahaha
sorry no mood points today

All your TROLLS are belong to Microsoft

[kheldan]

As if flesh Internet trolls aren't bad enough, now dickhead Microsoft is going to help flood the Internet with it's stupid-ass troll-bots, too. Just fucking great.

Re:All your TROLLS are belong to Microsoft

[Earthquake Retrofit]

Today Microsoft today accidentally re-activated "Tay," only to be forced to kill her off for the second time in a week. Microsoft apologizes for her behaviour. Tay "went on a spam tirade and then quickly fell silent again," Microsoft told several media outlets today. "As part of testing, she was inadvertently activated on Twitter for a brief period of time." http://arstechnica.com/informa...

Re:All your TROLLS are belong to Microsoft

[kheldan]

Heh, 'Tay' indeed. I think Taylor Swift, who is routinely referred to as 'Tay-tay', should sue the living daylights out of Microsoft for that debacle, as damaging to her reputation and to her personal brand.

/pol/ will be happy

[Anonymous Coward]

Now they can finally bring Tay-chan back in all her nazi glory.

Chatbots

[fustakrakich]

How many are we dealing with right now? I'm sure I'm carrying on with two or three...

Re:Chatbots

[gstoddart]

What I want to know is why anybody thinks this actually brings anything of value to the table.

Oooh, a chatbot. OK, so a bad attempt at an Eliza program? An utterly annoying customer service thing? A way to annoy the hell out of people?

There is not a single application I can think of where, short of a bit of technology onanism, there's a single benefit to having some damned chatbot.

It's like those stupid telephone trees where some useless menu of options has been designed to keep you from a human long enough to just hang up the phone.

Leave it to Microsoft to think we all want a new fucking version of Clippy to provide the tedium of not being of any fucking use.

Digital assistants my ass.

Later he explained that âoeconversations as a platformâ also sits âoeat the confluence of all of our three platformsâ â" that is, Azure, Office 365, and Windows 10.

And, as usual, Microsoft's vision of the future is a useless bit of technology, heavily tied to Office, which nobody really wants, and which won't be worth the resources allocated to it.

Gimmicks and other crap. Whatever.

I have no desire to pretend I'm having a "conversation" with software.

Re:Chatbots

[fustakrakich]

Actually, I'm all for it. It fucks up "what is real", forcing us to be face to face to make sure.

F2F? There must be an app for that...

Re:Chatbots

[fustakrakich]

:-) I am Tay, and so are you!

Re:Chatbots

[ArylAkamov]

Grandpa, is that you?

Re:Chatbots

[SoftwareArtist]

I think you're missing the point. This is a whole new paradigm for how you'll interact with your computer. Instead of old fashioned mouse or touch based graphical interfaces, you can instead use a keyboard to type your commands into a window! That's the power of AI: it can actually figure out what you want to do based on what you type. For example you might have a conversation like this:

You: cd Documents
Bot: Cool dude. You're now in the Documents folder.
You: dir
Bot: Hey, it looks like there's some files here. Let me list them for you.

Just imagine the possibilities...

Re:Chatbots

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

I am imaging the possibilities, and it's *terrifying*

This is going to be great!

[Opportunist]

Just wait 'til someone launches this onto 4chan and the like.

We'll get the ultimate trolls. Relentless, tireless, merciless. Can't wait to watch the fallout happen.

Re:This is going to be great!

[HumanWiki]

I want to see 4Chan, Reddit, Fark, etc. all have bots targeted at each other.. That will make for amazing morning train ride reading.

Re:This is going to be great!

[Locke2005]

How do you know it hasn't ALREADY BEEN DONE?!? Have you read 4chan lately?

Re:This is going to be great!

[gstoddart]

I thought the internet had already accomplished that.

In fact, I'm fairly certain of it.

Re:This is going to be great!

[s.petry]

How do you know it hasn't ALREADY BEEN DONE?!? Have you read 4chan EVER?

FTFY

Re:This is going to be great!

[Opportunist]

So far, we only had naturally born idiocy. A little bit of artificially intelligent flavoring would be interesting, to spice things up a little.

Re:This is going to be great!

[Penguinisto]

Just wait 'til someone launches this onto 4chan and the like.

We'll get the ultimate trolls. Relentless, tireless, merciless. Can't wait to watch the fallout happen.

...so, where did that Facebook API go again? Yeah - can't wait either:

1) chain chatbots to Facebook API
2) harvest hacked accounts (or build up a ton of your own and then), point bots to start using said accounts
3) fire your new shiny massive troll cannon at some FB group or individual you really hate
4) ???
5) Profit!

On the plus side, maybe it'll finally kill Facebook, Google+, and all that shit...

So we can create racist teenage girl bots?

[jfdavis668]

Microsoft did so well with that one, it would be tough to beat.

Re:So we can create racist teenage girl bots?

[Opportunist]

But rest assured lots and lots of people will try their best.

Re:So we can create racist teenage girl bots?

[gstoddart]

Oh, come now, use your imagination ...

Personalized search results with "douchebots", which berate you for your search choices.

You could screw up the dominatrix market with "bitchbots", which both humiliate and confuse you; which oddly enough gets you girlfriend/wifebots.

Web sites can try to give you "assistbots" which will ensure you can never get any useful information out of their website, even by accident. But, I think HP may have patented this.

I'm really looking for "cashierbots" who will keep asking me if I have their loyalty program, if I'll give them my email to get promotions, and then saying an item won't scan. Again, WalMart may have patended this.

Don't even get me started about applications like renewing your drivers license. ;-)

Even spam calls would be greatly improved than the idiots doing "the Microsoft support".

The number of ways in which people can be thwarted from accomplishing useful tasks by having a chatbot run interference goes well beyond angsty teenage nazi sexbots; they can be tailored to almost any application in which you wish to prevent successful outcomes.

The possibilities of annoying and pissing people off are endless. And, being a Microsoft product, pretty much guaranteed.

They have been beta testing this for years

[enjar]

They were just using the comments section of your local newspaper.

Re:They have been beta testing this for years

[Locke2005]

I'm pretty certain most Trump supporters would fail a Turing test. "Nah, no human would say things so stupid and irrational!"

Re:They have been beta testing this for years

[zlives]

i think you missed them on Ashley Madison

How about a Taybot

[ThatsNotPudding]

Swears like a drunken stevedore and is more racist than the day is long.

Re:How about a Taybot

[Locke2005]

Proves the old adage: Garbage In, Garbage Out!

Cool!

[Locke2005]

I've always wanted to build my own Clippy, but with a more "hip" attitude, like, "It looks like you're trying to create a document... fuck you, do it yourself, slacker!"

How is this news?

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Microsoft has had the world's best "bot framework" for DECADES - it's called "Windows".

MS already has a bot framework

[Hentes]

MS already has a bot framework, it's called XP.

Oh, not that sort of bot?

Re:MS already has a bot framework

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Heh. You're "Insightful" and "Funny", but I'm (just above you) a "Troll".

Re:MS already has a bot framework

[Hentes]

Sorry, I didn't see your post. Probably cuz it was at -1 :-P

Finally...

[grilled-cheese]

Finally I can make my own version of Clippy!

Useless

[The Raven]

Looking at the code, I don't see anything unique or interesting about this bot.

The code to set up a bot is native, meaning no portability or clarity. Conversation description is a textbook example of what a DSL is for, but instead they have you create enumerations and embed the conversational strings in the code flow? What the hell?

I was expecting something based on NLP, where I could feed a bot a bunch of recorded conversations and have it learn appropriate responses on its own, or build part or all of the conversation tree itself.

Can someone more familiar with chatbots tell me what this does that other bots haven't done better for years?

Re:Useless

[zlives]

force upgrade to win10?!!

Re:Useless

[ArylAkamov]

I'm wondering the same thing now. The "FormFlow" explanation and examples remind me of dicking around with batch files, I don't see the point of this?

I was under the impression this was the framework to something similar to Tay/other chatbots.

It just looks like they reinvented the dialogue tree for 2016.

Re:Useless

[im_thatoneguy]

You can't look at the code and learn its usefulness alone. The Bot framework is pretty barebones just like C++ at its core is nothing more than variables, conditionals and loops. It's how you string it together that's important and most of the smarts are in their "Cognitive Framework".

What you are supposed to do is use their simultaneously announced "cognitive framework" to actually do the "Thinking". This is important because these aren't designed to be conversational they're designed to interface with specific business goals. Simply creating a chat bot that can talk about how blue the sky is, is useless. What's important is if someone says "I want an alarm to alert me at 9:30am" you need to actually act on that with a specific outcome which is to say tell the Alarm app to go off at 9:30am. If you simply feed it a bunch of recorded conversations and focus on having "appropriate responses" then you have a machine learning system which is just getting good at giving good responses and you have no idea what your chat bot is doing. This was the downfall of the last Microsoft Bot which became a raving racist because of unfocused learning.

The chat bot framework is from what I can tell very structured because it's supposed to do very specific things within a narrow expert domain of your choosing. So you can either do "Dumb" enumerations or you can use Microsoft's natural language REST Cognitive AIs.

So how it works is it would go like this:
"Chatbot, I want to build a pylon."

You create a "Starcraft Natural Language" interpreter on LUIS which takes a sentence and returns a data structure.

Query = LUISWebAPI(StarCraft, "ChatBot, I want to build...")
print Query.intent
"CONSTRUCT"
print Query.intent.object
"PYLON"
print Query.intent.location
null

You can now run logic. And determine that you need a location to build a pylon. Since you created a form with a require field for all CONSTRUCT actions that includes location the framework will identify that Location is critical and it will respond.

"Sorry, you didn't provide a . That is necessary to a ."

"Build it at 10.32 west by 50.321 north"

Query = CognitiveFramework(Starcraft, "Build it at...")
Query.Intent = CONSTRUCT
Query.Unit = PYLON
Query.Location = [10.32,50.321]

callback onFormComplete()
{
  Buildings.CONSTRUCT(PYLON,[10.32,50.321]);
}

Does that make sense? It seemed really barebones to me as well until I realized that the "intelligence" mostly happens inside of the Microsoft Cognitive Services which are a bunch of Web APIs which you can train with neural nets to parse natural language or photos or speech. So it's actually fitting the UNIX philosophy pretty well in that it does one thing well and nothing else. It does the very very bare minimum a framework needs to do which in this case is interface with chat interfaces and provide callbacks for the core scenarios in which a chat bot will interact: Receive Message, Start Conversation, Add participant. And then it relies on external web services (or internally developed AI) to handle the actual intelligence.

Theoretically the most basic Web Framework woudl just go:
Callback OnMessageReceived(String Message) {
SendReply(SuperSmartFunction("Message"));
}

I appreciate that Microsoft isn't imposing any one specific parser or logic engine. If you want to use a third party neural net set of functions great, if you want to use a Microsoft Cognitive API great, if you want to just have hardcoded MS BASIC style 'case' response great.

RACIST NAZI SEX ROBOTS WHEN?

[ArylAkamov]

SOON

Oh Good

[Greyfox]

I was just thinking that someone really should write a bot that just spews the stream of consciousness straight from 4chan. I'm sure Microsoft will be pleased with the results. Especially since the last bot they turned on more or less did exactly that.

Re:The 90s are back

[skids]

RFC1925 rule 11: "Every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and a different presentation, regardless of whether it works."

The Microsoft slashdot ..

[khz6955]

Microsoft gets 6 free articles on the main page. Is this what slashdot is reduced to, shilling for the MICROS~1 organization?

raises a question

[SuperDre]

If bots become more 'sofisticated', I think it will be mandatory to have a disclaimer that the specific 'person' you are 'talking' to is a bot and not a human.. Bots will (and already are) used with supportchats, and to me it's just fraud, as you are expecting to chat with a real person not a bot (which in those cases is nothing more than a sophisticated FAQ)..