Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is pushing developers to create virtual assistants and intelligent chatbots to help users do everything from managing their calendars to booking hotel reservations.

To that end, Microsoft has published a new Bot Framework, which makes it easier to build chatbots using either C# or Node.js. Working with the tools isn’t so easy that anyone could do it, but they can help reduce some of the difficulties of conversing with a computer.

It was one of the main announcements from Nadella’s keynote address at Microsoft’s Build developer conference Wednesday. 

In a session following the keynote, Microsoft Senior Research Development Engineer Dan Driscoll revealed an interesting point in favor of creating intelligent bots as an interface for a service: The bots let developers meet users where they are without having to worry about what platform those people are on.

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