This site is obsolete and should be used for reference only. The information in this documentation is not guaranteed to work for Bot Framework SDK versions past 4.9.1.

What is a Bot Framework Skill?

Bot Framework Skills are re-usable conversational skill building-blocks covering conversational use-cases enabling you to add extensive functionality to a Bot within minutes. Skills include Language Understanding (LUIS) models, dialogs and integration code, delivered as source code enabling you to customize and extend as required. At this time we provide Calendar, Email, To Do, Point of Interest skills and a number of other experimental skills.

A Skill is like a standard conversational bot but with the ability to be plugged in to a broader solution. This can be a complex Virtual Assistant or perhaps an Enterprise Bot seeking to stitch together multiple bots within an organization.

Apart from some minor differences that enable this special invocation pattern, a Skill looks and behaves like a regular bot. The same protocol is maintained between two bots to ensure a consistent approach. Skills for common scenarios like productivity and navigation can be used as-is or customized however a customer prefers.

The Skill implementations currently provided are in C# only but the remote invocation nature of the Skills does enable you to invoke C# based Skills from a TypeScript Bot project.

Available Skill samples

The following Skill samples are available out of the box, each with deployment steps required to deploy and configure Skills for your use.


Experimental Skills

These experimental Bot Framework Skills are early prototypes to help bring Skill concepts to life for demonstrations and proof-of-concepts. By their very nature these Skills are not complete, with only English support. If you have any feedback on these Skills, please open a new issue on the Bot Framework Skills repository.

Next steps