Choose the right chatbot solution for your use case
This article provides an overview of some of the chatbot solutions Azure provides.
The following table lists Azure products and services for building bots, who they support, and a brief description. Following sections describe each product in more detail.
Product | Audience | Description |
---|---|---|
Bot Framework SDK | Developers | Provides a framework for building bots, including tools, templates, and related AI services. The SDK is ideal for developers who want to build bots that are publicly available on the Microsoft Teams app store. |
Bot Framework SDK
Microsoft Bot Framework and Azure AI Bot Service provide tools to build, test, deploy, and manage intelligent bots. The Bot Framework includes a modular and extensible SDK for building bots, including tools, templates, and related AI services. With this framework, developers can create bots that use speech, understand natural language, handle questions and answers, and more.
The SDK is ideal for developers who want to build bots that are publicly available on the Microsoft Teams app store.
Azure AI Bot Service and the Bot Framework offer:
- The Bot Framework SDK for developing bots.
- Bot Framework tools to cover end-to-end bot development workflow.
- The Bot Connector service to send and receive messages and events between bots and channels.
- Bot deployment and channel configuration in Azure.
Additionally, bots may make use of other Azure services:
- Azure AI services to build intelligent applications.
- Azure Storage for cloud storage.
For more information about the Bot Framework SDK, see What is the Bot Framework SDK. Once you have created and deployed your bot to Azure, the chatbot service consumes resources. For details about pricing, see Azure AI Bot Service pricing. Costs associated with the consumption of resources on Azure are in addition to the cost of the chatbot service itself.
Skill bots
As an advanced scenario, you can create a skill bot that provides features to other bots. You can develop the skill bot and the bot that consumes the skill in different products. For more information about skill bots, see: