Chatbot Development for Skype

Microsoft, built on Skype messenger, has created a bot platform, the Skype Bot.

Skype already has some official bot assistants, and the platform offers promising opportunities to create bots on your own.

The Skype text chatbot has all the essential messaging functionalities available:
Buttons - prompting the user to select a request or command from a list of ready ones;

Elements - messages with complete product cards (photo, price, name);

Payments via invoices and support for different payment systems.

There is an interesting function called "menu". It is a brief list of the bot features that pops up at the greeting.

It is a handy feature indeed, as it is immediately visible that it is a bot, and it is clear what it can do.

Skype Bot platform pays a lot of attention to the bot's communication language, considering that Microsoft is planning to create conversational bots that can communicate through audio and video calls.

Skype chatbots can:

- Retrieve keywords from text, and use them to make guesses about queries;

- Use context and experience to make assumptions;

- Independently generate fully conversational responses based on a semi-structured set of pre-defined templates. This system is already one step closer to human thinking, as it can automatically learn and make assumptions using its experience;

- Integrate with Google Analytics, and retrieve relevant data from there when prompted.

And as for the bot's ability to initiate messages to users, Skype cannot send messages to users who are not on the contact list. Consequently, a bot can send any mailings or surveys only to users who have added it to their contacts.

The Skype platform keeps updating its functionality and fixes bugs because Microsoft has "big plans" for it.