What are bot Standard/Premium channels in Microsoft bot connector?

Question

Can anyone explain what are the standard/premium channels in microsoft bot connector?

Is Skype, Skype for business, Slack, Kik - Standard/premium channels?

Answer 1

See FAQ here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/bot-service/

What are standard channels? Standard channels include Microsoft first-party services (such as Skype, Cortana and Microsoft Teams) and services with publicly available Bot APIs (such as Facebook and Slack). Please refer to the Bot Service documentation for the complete list.

What are premium channels? The premium channels allow your bot to reliably communicate with users within your own application or on your website. These channels allow you to customise the client experience for your users by customising the open source DirectLine and Web Chat clients. Please refer to the Bot Service documentation for details.

So:

• Premium: DirectLine, Webchat
• Standard: all others

I agree that it's quite unclear. Someone already created a ticket on Github about that, see here: https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/bot-framework-docs/issues/113