The Real-Time Media Platform for Bots adds a new dimension to how bots can interact with users by enabling real-time voice, video and screen sharing modalities. This provides the capability to build compelling and interactive entertainment, educational, and assistance bots. Users communicate with real-time media bots using Skype.

This is an advanced capability which allows the bot to send and receive voice and video content frame by frame. The bot has "raw" access to the voice, video and screen-sharing real-time modalities. For example, as the user speaks, the bot will receive 50 audio frames per second, with each frame containing 20 milliseconds (ms) of audio. The bot can perform real-time speech recognition as the audio frames are received, rather than having to wait for a recording after the user has stopped speaking. The bot can also send high-definition-resolution video to the user at 30 frames per second, along with audio.

The Real-Time Media Platform for Bots works with the Skype Calling Cloud to take care of call setup and media session establishment, enabling the bot to engage in a voice and (optionally) video conversation with a Skype caller. The platform provides a simple "socket"-like API for the bot to send and receive media, and handles the real-time encoding and decoding of media, using codecs such as SILK for audio and H.264 for video.

Currently Real-Time Media Platform supports P2P bots only. Conferencing scenarios are not supported.

To develop a real-time media bot, you must install these NuGet packages within your Visual Studio project:

• Bot Builder Real-Time Media Calling for .NET
• Microsoft.Skype.Bots.Media .NET library

• Review the documentation to understand the concepts behind building real-time media bots.
• Check out the requirements for real-time media bots.
• Get started quickly with our samples.

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact [email protected] with any additional questions or comments.

Release notes

• Due to privacy concerns with bots, conferencing scenarios are currently not supported. Hence we have removed the MeetingScreenShots sample. We are working on enabling this feature again.