Microsoft started highlighting its work on bots earlier this year. It has been building bots inside Skype to enable new forms of interaction. It has detailed quite a few bots that will soon be available for Skype, including those from companies like Expedia, but that doesn’t mean Microsoft’s bot ambitions have been fulfilled. Microsoft will soon allow partners to create bots “with the general availability of the Skype calling API.”
The Expedia bot will enable users to quickly search for hotels, make bookings, manage reservations, and confirm or cancel hotel and flight bookings all from inside Skype. The bot is also the first of its kind to allow calling directly to Expedia free of charge.
Shipping company UPS has also created a Skype bot which can track packages, calculate shipping rates, and find a local brand for the user. Skype users can ask the bot personalized questions and receive personalized answers.
Bots “with the general availability of the Skype calling API” means that users will be able to interact with bots that are actually capable of speaking to them. This means that they will be able to talk to bots just like they would talk to another human being, so for example, instead of typing to ask a bot to track a package, users will just be able to ask the bot in a conversational manner.
Microsoft says that these new bot features will arrive in 2017.
Filed in . Read more about Bots, Microsoft and Skype. Source: blogs.skype