Microsoft introduced the Azure Bot Framework more than two years ago and companies have been building chatbots for a variety of scenarios ever since.

Today, the company made generally available the Microsoft Azure Bot Service and Microsoft Cognitive Language Understanding service (known as LUIS).

When you combine the bot building tools with the LUIS language understanding tool, you get what should be a powerful combination.

The latter helps the bot understand and parse the query to deliver the correct answer (and understand related queries).

Cheng said more than 200,000 developers have signed up for the Bot service, and they currently have 33,000 active bots in areas like retail, healthcare, financial services and insurance.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/12/13/microsoft-launches-bot-engine-and-language-understanding-services-out-of-beta/