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A year after the launch of the Microsoft Bot Framework, today Microsoft announced that its toolkit for creating bots is now used by over 130,000 developers. This number is up from the 45,000 developers that were using the framework in September 2016.
The developer number was announced together with a series of new features for the framework, including a way to make payments inside bots and the ability to publish bots to Skype for Business, the Bing search engine, and the Cortana intelligent assistant.
The news was announced today at Build, Microsoft’s annual developer conference taking place May 10-12 in Seattle.
Also announced today, bot developers can now choose whether to publish their bot to Cortana the same way they would decide if they publish a bot to Skype or Slack. The Cortana Skills Kit for the creation of third party voice apps was also made available to developers today in public preview.
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A lot has changed since the Bot Framework first came on to the scene last year on the stage at Build 2016 in San Francisco.
In the months following launch, the bot framework made integrations with Facebook Messenger and Kik and later with Howdy, creator of the Slack botkit.
Adaptive Cards also made their debut today, allowing for cards presented in bots to be used across multiple platforms and apps.
Last summer Skype bots learned how to chat in groups, and The Azure Bot Service for bots and AI that operate in the cloud also made its debut.
In another major recent round-number bot milestone, Facebook Messenger announced two weeks ago that developers have made a total of 100,000 bots.
