Just as soon as we hear about Google’s virtual assistant, announced this week at Google’s annual I/O conference, we find out that Microsoft is building its own virtual assistant, the ‘Bing Concierge Bot’. The assistant, according to a job posting found by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, will communicate on a number of platforms.

The posting, now unavailable, read:

“In Bing Concierge Bot Our team we are building a highly intelligent productivity agent that communicates with the user over a conversation platform, such as Skype, Messenger, SMS, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc. The agent does what a human assistant would do: it runs errands on behalf of the user, by automatically completing tasks for the user. The users talk to the agent in natural language, and the agent responds in natural language to collect all the information; once ready, it automatically performs the task for the user by connecting to service providers. For example, the user might ask ‘make me a reservation at an Italian place tonight’, and the agent will respond with ‘for how many people?’; after several such back-and-forth turns it will confirm and book the restaurant that the user picked.”

Microsoft declined to comment when asked to expatiate on the details of the Bing bot, although the posting is clear enough. Much like Facebook’s M and the new Google assistant the Bing Concierge Bot aims to make life easier, except while the latter will work only in Facebook Messenger and Google Allo respectively, the Bing bot has the advantage of working within a number of services.

This might not come as a surprise as Microsoft put great emphasis on encouraging developers to build bots during Build 2016, as part of Microsoft’s Cognitive Services and Bot Framework. Microsoft said the plan was to encourage developers “to build intelligent bots that enable customers to chat using natural language on a wide variety of platforms including text/SMS, Office 365, Skype, Slack, the Web and more.”

It looks now like the wheels are set in motion. During the Build conference Microsoft’s CEO talked about bots as being tech’s “next big thing”, adding that chatbots will have, “as profound an impact as previous shifts we’ve had.” While some chatbots haven’t exactly been getting the best praise, it seems only a matter time given such investments by such tech giants that communicating with a chatbot will be commonplace.

Photo credit: Johannes Marliem via Flickr