Microsoft launches Industry’s First Cloud Bot-as-a-Service" platform. The Azure Bot Service is powered by the Microsoft Bot Framework and has a serverless compute back-end built on Azure Functions. Using the bot service allows developers to build conversational applications that plug into many popular chat applications including Slack, Facebook Messenger, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Kik and Office 365. It also has support for text/sms messaging and can be embedded within custom websites. The Microsoft Bot-as-a-Service platforms aims to simplify the experience for developers. To accelerate the development process, Microsoft has included samples, Visual Studio and Visual Code support, templates and an integrated chat window that can all be used for testing locally before you publish your bot to Azure. Once your bot has been published to Azure, it can scale on-demand by leveraging capabilities found in Azure Functions.