Microsoft Teams Bot without Azure

Question

I've recently started digging into teams bot and from what I've learned so far, we cannot use our teams bot without azure. I just wanted to know whether I'm right or wrong. If wrong, can you please tell me in detail how to create a bot that can listen to incoming messages and send messages to teams using python? Also if I were to use azure, will it be necessary for other people to be on azure to use my bot?

Answer 1

If you're really interested in the detail, I have a post on my blog that might be useful: https://hilton.giesenow.com/how-bot-calls-actually-work

In short though, to build a bot for Teams, you need to have your bot registered in the Microsoft Bot Framework Services engine, which you do via a registration in Azure. You can do this without the bot being hosted in Azure though - it can live on any https endpoint (e.g. hosted in AWS). You do still need some kind of hosting though, so Microsoft give you the option of creating the Bot Framework Services AND a hosting package combined - you just need to choose which option suits you when creating the bot in the Azure portal.

Separate to the hosting, you can code your bot in a variety of languages, using the bot builder sdk, and Python is definitely an option. See for example here, and for each of the samples section in the page, choose the "python" language option.