Skype for Business Chatbot

Question

I have already created a Skype for business bot. I have a couple of questions related to the same.

1. When using Microsoft Bot framework can we have this deployed on-premise? if yes then how can we do achieve this?

2. If it is mandate to deploy this to cloud what are the charges for this?

3. I already have the code which intercepts incoming message on skype is there a way out we can suppress the UI so that the code silently intercepts the message and replies to the message.

I had already written a service 3 years back which intercepts the incoming message and replies to the user as per the request, but skype for business lands up with multiple conversation windows on the machine which hosts this service.

Answer 1

Just to put this out there, concerning your third question:

Answer 2

My knowledge is a little limited but I can answer the first point for you. The bot framework needs an internet connection to communicate with the Bot Connector so provided you're hosting this on an internal, on-premises server with a valid internet connection you should be good to go.

As for pricing, the Microsoft Bot Framework is considered open source however if you're talking about utilising the Azure Bot Service, depending on what kind of service your after, the price can vary. See the link below for more pricing information:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bot-service/

As for the final point, Sadly I'm unable to answer that however it doesn't seem like an outlandish demand. Hopefully someone else can come along and give a more detailed answer. (This is my first Stack Overflow answer so be gentle, I've been coding solo for the last few years).