Progress Enables Developers to Add Chatbots to Apps Using Telerik and Kendo UI

Progress, a provider of application development and deployment technologies, announced the addition of conversational UI components for Telerik and Kendo UI, a packaged set of user interface (UI) components built specifically for chatbots. The components, offered as part of the popular Progress Telerik and Progress Kendo UI developer tooling, enable .NET and JavaScript developers to create enhanced natural conversational experiences across platforms and devices, on any chatbot framework – including Microsoft Azure Bot Service, Facebook Wit.ai, Google DialogFlow, Amazon Lex, and more.

Chatbots are a critical capability for enabling low-cost anytime interactions with customers. However, building a chatbot is time consuming, and delivering one that offers an effective natural customer interaction is a challenge. The conversational UI components for Telerik and Kendo UI are a set of UI controls that enable .NET and JavaScript developers to create modern chatbot apps on their framework of choice that improve the natural flow of chat-based conversation using packaged visual elements.

The conversational UI functionality is available in more than a dozen Telerik and Kendo UI toolsets. As is standard across Progress’ UI tools, the components are easy to implement using existing development skills and with the technologies that developers prefer. Through the conversational UI components, developers can implement key UI design features such as calendars and date pickers that allow the developer to better control the direction of the conversation.

New conversational UI capabilities include:

• Framework-Agnostic: compatible with all major chatbot frameworks including Microsoft Azure Bot Service, Facebook Wit.ai, Google DialogFlow, Amazon Lex, and more.
• Consistent Design Experience: giving chatbots the same look and feel as any other web, desktop, or mobile applications, leveraging highly-customizable components.
• Natural Conversation Flow: a visually appealing experience that enables and enhances the natural conversation flow between chatbot and users.
• Easy Implementation: use existing .NET and/or JavaScript skills to easily implement the components in any web, desktop or mobile chatbot application.

For developers that want to build their own chat experiences on frameworks offered by Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Amazon, Progress’ newly announced conversational UI components for Telerik and Kendo UI make it easy to build an engaging chat experience. For organizations looking for an out-of-the-box chatbot solution for transactional customer service use cases, Progress offers Progress NativeChat, an AI-based chatbot solution that can be trained and deployed in weeks.