Remember those early virtual assistant bots? They were quite the leap forward, weren't they? Built on the Bot Framework SDK, they brought sophisticated, assistant-style conversations to life across a whole range of users and partners. Think core utility intents, support for multiple languages, speech capabilities, skill dispatch, feedback mechanisms, authentication, telemetry, and even deployment scripts, CI/CD, and analytics dashboards. It was a comprehensive package designed to make building intelligent assistants more accessible.
But as with all technology, things evolve. The sheer popularity of these virtual assistants, coupled with the growing traction of Bot Framework Composer for authoring conversational experiences, led to a natural shift. Customer feedback played a huge role, prompting a focus on deeply integrating these powerful capabilities directly into the core product. This wasn't just a minor update; it was a significant evolution, culminating in new features available from May 2021.
What does this mean in practice? Well, core functionalities like activity routing, interruption handling, multi-language support, speech, and telemetry are now infused directly into the SDK. This significantly reduces the burden on developers, freeing them from the nitty-gritty implementation and ongoing support for these foundational elements. The investment in the adaptive runtime and bot components also aims to simplify bot infrastructure, making it easier to add new capabilities as needed.
Composer itself received a major facelift. There's a new creation experience, offering a variety of templates designed for popular scenarios. The 'Core Assistant' template, for instance, mirrors the capabilities of the older Virtual Assistant template but provides much more granular control and configuration. The beauty here is flexibility; you can start with something as simple as a QnA-based experience and progressively add more sophisticated features over time using the component model. For those needing more out-of-the-box enterprise-grade functionality, the 'Enterprise Assistant' template builds upon the Core Assistant, incorporating features like Calendar and People (formerly WhoBot) capabilities.
Provisioning has also been streamlined. Composer now offers Azure provisioning automation directly within the tool, going beyond the older deployment scripts. If a developer lacks the necessary Azure permissions, it even facilitates a handoff to an Azure administrator. Essentially, the capabilities that once defined the Virtual Assistant solution are now available as templates and packages within Composer.
And what about skills? Making a bot available as a skill is now much simpler. Any bot built with Composer can be readily exposed as a skill, a departure from the previous requirement of a specific skill template. Connecting these skills to a Composer-based bot is also automated through a new skill connection experience. This seamless integration is further enhanced by the introduction of the 'Orchestrator' capability, which significantly improves skill dispatch quality and is automatically enabled when you add a skill. This effectively replaces the older 'Dispatch' capability.
For those working with existing Virtual Assistant bots, it's important to know they aren't left behind. These bots leverage the v4 Bot Framework SDK, which Composer itself relies on and is actively supported. So, your existing investments remain unaffected. However, some specific tools are being deprecated. The 'botskills CLI', which automated skill registration, was deprecated on December 31, 2021, with Composer's native skills registration and configuration taking its place. Similarly, the 'Dispatch CLI' was also deprecated on the same date, superseded by Orchestrator.
It's also worth noting a significant change in the QnA Maker landscape. Azure QnA Maker is set to be retired on March 31, 2025, with new resource creation stopping from October 1, 2022. The updated question-answering capability is now part of Azure AI Language, and for Composer users, this means looking into 'Custom question answering' for natural language processing needs.
The journey from standalone Virtual Assistant bots to the integrated, flexible, and powerful environment of Composer represents a significant step forward in making advanced conversational AI more accessible and manageable for developers.
