After I released the “Buss oracle” MSN bot I’ve gotten some great feedback, both from end users and other .NET developers. I’ve also posted an article up on msstudent.no on how to use the DotMSN library to build your own bot. I know some of the readers of my blog are interested in this topic, so this should be some very interesting news.
Conversagent, the company behind the Encarta MSN bot implementation is making their BuddyScript SDK available for free download for anyone who wants to try to build a bot or activity application. The free download offer is valid for at least 6 months, starting January 29, 2006. The limitation of bots built using this SDK is 50 000 sessions per month. If you’re building something really popular that requires more sessions they can evaluate your bots on a case by case basis and remove the limitations. The bot itself is hosted by Conversagent on one of their servers.
The website says nothing about what will happen after the 6 month period, if this will be made available for free on a permanent basis, or if it will be made available as an commercial product. There is allso a forum post written by MSN Product Manager Todd Biggs avilable at the Messenger API forum at MSDN.
I haven’t had time to download and check out the SDK my self yet, but I figured I had to get this post out there. Thanks to Jan Kristian for mentioning this. If you want an example of what you could possible build, just check out the Encarta bot by adding encarta@conversagent.com to your contact list in MSN Messenger.
I’ll keep you posted as I find out more about this SDK and what you can do with it!