Currently I’m spending some time prototyping different bots built with the Microsoft Bot framework. The other day I was going to try out the Facebook connector that allows your bot to talk to people using Facebook messenger.
But before I started coding I want to get a sense of what is possible so I wanted to tryout some of the existing bots that use Microsoft’s bot framework and the Facebook connector.
Luckily, Microsoft have a bot directory that lists all publicly available bots built using their framework. Unfortunately, the web page use to present the directory on have very limited filtering functionality, so I couldn’t do a search for all bots that are available on Facebook, or any other channel that I’m particularly interested in.
But fear not, I have created a little Power BI report that give you that missing filter functionality and in addition provide you with a great overview of all bots in the directory. The Power BI report is embedded below, but can also be downloaded from my github, or open it in a another window using this link https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiNmYxNDI5NzYtN2YzOS00YWU5LWJkMWYtYWM2NDBmZWI4MjAwIiwidCI6IjBkM2FhOGY5LTgxNjgtNGJjMi1iZGExLWMzOTcyZTZkOTM1MiIsImMiOjh9 (I recommend the later as, the embedded window is kinda small on).
You might wonder where the data comes from. Well, the data is available in the REST API that is used by the bot directory page, so I connected Power BI to the JSON data source and added a little extra structure to the data, to make it easier to gain insights about bots.