Naina Khedekar

At the Build 2016, Satya Nadella went all out by saying 'bots are the new apps', indicating a shift in the mobile tech paradigm. The company hasn't largely been able to bounce back in the mobile device space, but is trying to turn its fortunes around in the mobile software space. While most tech enthusiasts were in line and quick to envisage a bot-era, a lot would depend on how companies like Microsoft would add to make it a reality. Now, adding weightage to his words, Microsoft has announced new updates.

Microsoft has updated its Skype Bot developer platform with support for groups and cards. This means bots can be a part of your group conversations. "Make Skype Bots that are more productive—or just entertaining—for groups of users. Bots can now be a part of and respond to group conversations," Microsoft writes.

Moreover, Skype Bots can also work with visual image, carousel and receipt cards. Also in works is single sign-in directly on cards, allowing you to authorise credentials just one time. This means, you can now connect and communicate with businesses, without the need to login several times. Skype has also collaborated with Bing to display the preview of Bing Entity and Intent detection so that natural language understanding is built right into Skype Bots, which it claims is an industry-first.

Adding to the list of updates, Microsoft Bot Framework has also introduced support for Skype calling, Slack buttons, and some Facebook bot features. Making it even more easier, Microsoft has now brought Skype Bot Platform and the Microsoft Bot Framework under one umbrella. "Using the Microsoft Bot Framework you can publish your bot to Skype, and submit for promotion in the Skype and Microsoft bot directories, as well as get access to great bot building tools," Microsoft adds in the blogpost.

With the new update, Nadella is hinting that he wasn't just speculating at Build 2016. The company has been taking bots extremely seriously, and ensuring all the help is out there to developers. The company already has a fairly successful bot in China called Xiaoice. In fact, Xiaoice AI becomes the first live TV weather host.

"The Chinese live program, "Morning News" introduced Xiaoice as a trainee anchor last Tuesday, where it took charge of the daily weather report. Microsoft says it calls upon smart cloud technologies and big data to learn about and interpret weather readings and then deliver reports with her "unique artificial intelligent style of emotional comments." The AI is also more human-like than any other system of its kind, scoring 4.32 out of 5 in linguistic naturalness tests. For comparison, humans have an average score of 4.76," points out Engadget.

The latest numbers indicate that 30,000 developers are building bots for MS platforms. Microsoft has also planned a Skype bot hackathon in Palo Alto on 21-22 June. While it is too early to say if bots will replace apps, but for now, the space looks promising with leading tech giants working at it.