Microsoft offers the Azure Bot Service (replacing the former Microsoft Bot Framework), a managed bot building platform, which provides an integrated environment that is purpose-built for bot development, enabling you to build, connect, test, deploy, and manage intelligent bots, all from one place.
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Flutter
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Flutter is an open-source mobile application development framework created by Google. It is used to develop applications for Android and iOS, as well as being the primary method of creating applications for Google Fuchsia.
From personal experience, I can recommend the Azure AI service to reduce the burden on your customer service team, as we did. We created a customer service bot and automated our Frequently Asked Questions section, as well as an interactive platform for registering other complaints that the bot cannot handle, which are later addressed by our customer service team.
Flutter by Google is well suited where you have to make an app across multiple platforms like iOS, Android, Web, Desktop and you don't have the bandwidth to create multiple teams for the Native app. This makes sure you have a faster development and you don't have to worry about how your product will look across different platforms. It is also very smooth/fast in response, making it close to feel like a Native app, this makes it an easy pick for a Fintech product where speed matters. Flutter by Google also has a huge library of Components, which are well tested and developed by Google's Flutter by Google team itself, making the development even more fast since the majority of required components are already available.
Occasionally updates to the Flutter SDK result in wide-sweeping changes that seem to not be thoroughly tested and considered. Flutter sometimes evolves too fast for its own good.
While the 3rd-party Flutter package ecosystem is vast and rich, 1st-party support for basic things (audio/video playback, battery information, Bluetooth services, etc.) are lacking. You are occasionally forced to rely on an open-source package for use-cases that other platforms have native support for.
Documentation, particularly around testing, is lacking. While there are some great docs, like the Dart Style Guide, many Flutter-focused support documents are lacking in quality and real-world usability.
Flutter allows you to architect an app however you want. While this is a great feature, it also adds complexity and leads to the current state of Flutter's state management, where there are 50+ options on how to organize your app, with very little official guidance or recommendations from the Flutter team. For a beginner, this can create decision paralysis.
Azure AI Bot Service comes with an Integrated Development Environment and Bot Framework SDK that simplifies development. Having a single codebase for multiple channels, such as MS Teams, Facebook, and Slack, makes it easier to target multiple platforms without requiring redevelopment. LUIS and OpenAI can be easily integrated with your Chatbot to provide a seammless chat bot expereince to customers.
Flutter by Google is very easy to start with. The initial setup they provide is very helpful and easy to understand. The default project setup is also good and can be deployed to production without changing much. Flutter by Google provides a huge library of components, which are created and tested by their own team, making the development of application much faster and robust. Flutter by Google also has a huge community support where we can find components built by the community and we can contribute our own components as well, which helps in faster dev time. Applications developed using Flutter by Google are very smooth, almost feels like native, which helps in creating good impression on customers/clients.
Microsoft's customer service staff is friendly and extremely knowledgeable. They are always available to assist you with bot framework-related issues that you may be experiencing. They provide training sessions, manuals, and support personnel, among other things. Bugs were easily spotted and patched, which was one of my pet peeves about patching.
Microsoft Bot Framework is much better and well more established without a lot of proprietary software/coding language. Lex is very limited with integration with standard hardware and network configurations. Lex has performance issues and was too slow to meet near real-time collaboration requirements. Bot Framework complements many other Microsoft communication products and this was key to implementing without a lot of new training required.
I have experience with react and React Native. I would say that the idea behind all those frameworks are quite similar. However, I found the javascript-based frameworks a bit more accessible as you could utilise your javascript knowledge. Here, Flutter works with its own language. This has advantages and disadvantages sometimes. I found the community around javascript frameworks bigger and therefore sometimes more helpful. However, Flutter does a good job here as well. I think the main argument for Flutter is its usability for less experienced developers. If you do not have knowledge in javascript or other programming languages then I think it is much easier to start with Flutter than with another framework like react. I think the package that you get form scratch is better than in the other frameworks were you have to set up and learn a lot more before you can start.
The rapid development capabilities of Flutter allow us to build apps we could not have previously considered commercially viable, opening new revenue streams.
Free and open licensing made adoption very easy (ie. free/low cost!).
In comparison to Qt, our time spent arguing with build tools and perfecting development environments has decreased substantially.
