Summarize and Murphy Bots Join Skype

Last week at Build 2016, Microsoft talked a lot about Conversation as a Platform and how they plan to use their new Bot Framework to empower developers to build their own bots for interacting with customers.

Microsoft envisions bots becoming so mainstream that just like every company has a website - all of those companies will eventually have a bot that can assist their audience as well.

That bots presence will be available in multiple forms of media as well and of course Microsoft wants them to be accessible through a platform like Skype for instance.

That is why last week, after discussing the Bot Framework at Build 2016, Microsoft released an update to Skype that introduced four initial bots for use.

Those four bots, Bing Images, Bing News, Bing Music and Getty Images were basic search bots. All you could do is type in a search phrase and the bot would return up to three results.

This week, the addition of bots named Murphy and Summarize, bring some additional functionality to Skype.

Project Murphy allows you to ask What if questions and will provide you a meme result if the right question is asked. It is based on Microsoft's Project Murphy.

Summarize will read a link to an online story for you and summarize it in about three paragraphs. Based on my testing this might work very well on a short article but when I asked the bot to summarize the 1,200 words I wrote yesterday about Re-Experiencing HoloLens at Build 2016, it came back with three paragraphs that were focused on the first half of my story.

Understandably, these bots are just an introduction to the process of interacting and making queries - over time they should improve as their logic and capabilities are expanded by their developers.