Seeking clarity on the current status and future of Bot Framework Webchat

[HesselWellema]

I have a question

For years, I've relied on the Bot Framework webchat to deploy chatbots for my customers. Its ease of implementation, flexibility, and exceptional support have always stood out. However, over the past few months, I've found myself pondering the current status of this product.

Expectations were set regarding the support for streaming answers from Large Language Models (LLMs), a highly anticipated enhancement. Yet, there's been a noticeable silence on this front for some time. Additionally, I've observed a rise in the number of reported bugs. Please don't misunderstand my point; I genuinely believe the team behind this product is doing fantastic work. My concern, however, is that it seems to be receiving less attention than it used to. Perhaps priorities have shifted to other initiatives? If that's the case, I believe it would be beneficial for us, the users, to be informed about what we can expect moving forward.

[compulim]

We are very actively working on this.

This work requires collaboration across multiple team and products. Multiple parts moving at the same time now:

• Bot Framework Spec: update schema to explain how to stream typing
• Bot SDK: APIs to stream typing
• Chat adapters: receive typing in an efficient manner over Direct Line and other custom protocols
• Web Chat: animate typing
• Other clients: actively working with other product groups to support this feature

Here is a video showing our internal prototype of Web Chat.

Web.Chat.-.Message.revisioning.with.AOAI.mp4

[HesselWellema]

Thanks a lot for the update @compulim ! Really good to hear about all the work going on behind the scenes. This clears up a lot of the fog for us and our customers. Appreciate it!

[anshumankmr]

Hi, @compulim when can we expect this to be released?

[rliberoff]

Hi @compulim

Do you know if the newest version 4.18.0 has this feature?

Thank you.

[HesselWellema]

@rliberoff It has. Just upgraded some implementations. Do pay attention to the way you create ad send the typing events from your bot. It is (at least in 4.17) not exactly like documented