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Microsoft trots out Deion Sanders to demo fantasy football chat bot

During Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella’s keynote address at the company’s Ignite cloud conference on Monday, he brought out a number of Microsoft employees to demo various features. But for a demo of Microsoft’s chat-bot tools for developers, Nadella brought out … NFL Hall of Famer Deion Sanders.

Microsoft first unveiled its Microsoft Bot Framework in March, at its Build developer conference. The goal is that companies will use the framework to build chat bots both for their own internal purposes and for their customers’ needs.

Bot technology, Nadella said, is a “convenient way to interact with your information, your data, your process.” But building a bot still isn’t simple—it requires a “conversational understanding.” It needs to be able “to parse phrases.”

Nadella says companies like discount travel app Hipmunk, ticketing site StubHub, and media photo repository Getty Images have all built bots using the Microsoft framework already.

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And now Microsoft is working with the NFL to make a bot for fantasy football. “It’s the most data-driven application I’ve come across” for a chat bot, Nadella raved, because football is so rich with granular player stats. Nadella hopes the bot can “allow every one of us to engage in a special way with fantasy football.”

Sanders came out to show off what the bot can do thus far, and weighed whether to “start” Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan or New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees in fantasy football on Monday night. When Sanders first logged in, he remarked that he liked how the system greeted him by his name, and knew him.

“That’s conversational interface,” said Nadella excitedly.

Microsoft is hardly the only tech giant to jump into chat bots. Facebook (FB) first announced the rollout of conversational service bots inside its Messenger platform at its F8 developer conference in April. Since then, the Facebook chat bots have not made a big splash, mostly because they aren’t essential for most users.

Microsoft hopes to have its fantasy football bot ready by next NFL season. But will fans want to use it?

Daniel Roberts is a writer at Yahoo Finance, covering sports business and technology. Follow him on Twitter at @readDanwrite.

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