Chatbots will take center stage at Microsoft Corp.’s Connect(); developer conference in New York this week.

Harry Shum, the head of the company’s artificial intelligence group, laid the groundwork for the event today by announcing a new cloud tool designed to speed up the creation of virtual agents. The Azure Bot Service, as it’s called, offers a hosted version of the Microsoft Bot Framework that the software giant released at its Build conference back in March. Shum claims that the open-source toolkit has since been adopted by more than 50,000 developers around the world.

Those users will now be able to run their chatbots in a managed environment that doesn’t require any maintenance and includes an array of features for streamlining the application lifecycle. When a developer launches a new project in the Azure Bot Service, they can choose between starting out with a clean slate or using one of four templates that Microsoft has helpfully built into the platform. These blueprints are available alongside a native code editor that the company says was specifically designed with artificial intelligence applications in mind. It currently only supports the C# and Node.js programming languages, but the software giant will no doubt add more languages over time as it works to expand the appeal of the service.

Software teams with more advanced requirements, meanwhile, can connect the Azure Bot Service to their external code editor and source control system of choice. Microsoft also provides integration with its Azure Cognitive Services to let users quickly incorporate advanced machine learning features such as voice recognition into their chatbots. The company says that agents created using its tool can be deployed to Slack, Skype, Office 365 and numerous other popular platforms.

The introduction of Azure Bot Service adds Microsoft’s name to a growing list of tech companies that are working to capitalize on the rapid rise of conversational artificial intelligence. Previously, Google Inc. acquired a startup called API.AI Inc. to develop its own chatbot development platform. And Oracle Corp. introduced a competing cloud-based tool a few weeks earlier that enables business workers to create virtual agents using drag-and-drop commands.

Microsoft is relying on Azure Cognitive Services and the other advanced features in its public cloud to stand out from the pack. This strategy already appears to be yielding fruit: The company announced this morning that it has landed a landmark infrastructure deal with OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research group backed by the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. The firm is using Microsoft’s recently introduced N-Series instances to power its experimental neural networks.

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