The Microsoft Bot Framework provides just what you need to build and connect intelligent bots that interact naturally wherever your users are talking, from text/sms to Skype, Slack, Office 365 mail and other popular services.

The Microsoft Bot Builder SDK is one of three main components of the Microsoft Bot Framework. It is a powerful, easy-to-use framework that provides a familiar way for .NET and Node.js developers to develop bots. The Bot Builder SDK provides features that make interactions between bots and users much simpler. Bot Builder also includes an emulator for debugging your bots, as well as a large set of sample bots you can use as building blocks.

Think of a bot as an app that users interact with in a conversational way. Bots can communicate conversationally with text, cards , or speech. A bot may be as simple as basic pattern matching with a response, or it may be a sophisticated weaving of artificial intelligence techniques with complex conversational state tracking and integration to existing business services.

The Bot Framework enables you to build bots that support different types of interactions with users. You can design conversations in your bot to be freeform. Your bot can also have more guided interactions where it provides the user choices or actions. The conversation can use simple text strings or more complex rich cards that contain text, images, and action buttons. And you can add natural language interactions, which let your users interact with your bots in a natural and expressive way.

Developers writing bots all face the same problems: bots require basic I/O, they must have language and dialog skills, and they must connect to users, preferably in any conversation experience and language the user chooses. The Bot Framework provides powerful tools and features to help solve these problems and more with features like automatic translation to more than 30 languages, user and conversation state management, debugging tools, an embeddable web chat control and a way for users to discover, try, and add bots to the conversation experiences they love.

Review the documentation to get started with the Bot Builder SDK!

Get started quickly with our samples:

• Bot Builder samples GitHub repo
• More samples are available within the SDK C#, Node.js

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This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.