Over the past few years, Microsoft was licensing its Bing application programming interfaces to developers so they can incorporate things like search, maps and speech into their full-fledged apps.
But going forward, Microsoft is trying to make the idea of extending apps with Bing's intelligence easier. The company is packaging up some of its Bing intelligence and delivering it to developers in the form of bots and a
bot development framework.
Microsoft officials showed off the company's new bot framework and newly available bots at its Build 2016 developers conference in San Francisco this week.
While Microsoft recently had its own social-chat bot experiment --
a teen bot called Tay.ai -- go awry -- the company is pushing ahead with more productivity-centric bots.
This new Microsoft strategy is all about "conversation as a platform," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Build attendees. "It's the power of human language applied to all computer interfaces," and makes use of machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies under the hood.
"Human language is the new user interface layer," Nadella said.
