Progress (NASDAQ:PRGS), the leading provider of application development and deployment technologies, today announced the addition of conversational UI components for Telerik and Kendo UI, the industry's first 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. Organizations are looking for a better way to enable high quality chatbots in their apps. 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.

"Microsoft is giving every developer the tools to be an AI developer, and we work with companies like Progress to empower the community with services and components that help make this a reality," said Beth Massi, Senior Product Marketing Manager, .NET Platform at Microsoft Corp. "Tools like conversational UI help our .NET community build more visually appealing, easy-to-use chatbots that will improve the overall customer experience and increase adoption and usage of AI technology."

• 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.

"Our expertise lies in our ability to deliver the best technology for building and deploying the applications of tomorrow. The release of the conversational UI components for Telerik and Kendo UI is another example of that commitment to innovation," said Faris Sweis, SVP & General Manager Developer Tooling, Progress. "We are the first to market with a packaged set of components that enhances the capabilities of popular chatbot frameworks and are working with companies such as Microsoft, Amazon and Google to put the tools in the hands of our developers that will ensure their success in our ever-evolving technology world."

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.

Conversational UI components for Telerik and Kendo UI will be available on May 16. To view a demo today, visit the Progress booth (#53) at Microsoft BUILD. For more information, go to www.telerik.com/conversational-ui or join our R2 2018 Telerik Release webinar on Wednesday, May 30 at 11:30 am ET.

For more information on Progress NativeChat see https://www.progress.com/nativechat.

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About Progress
Progress (NASDAQ:PRGS) offers the leading platform for developing and deploying strategic business applications. We enable customers and partners to deliver modern, high-impact digital experiences with a fraction of the effort, time and cost. Progress offers powerful tools for easily building adaptive user experiences across any type of device or touchpoint, award-winning machine learning that enables cognitive capabilities to be a part of any application, the flexibility of a serverless cloud to deploy modern apps, business rules, web content management, plus leading data connectivity technology. Over 1,700 independent software vendors, 100,000 enterprise customers, and two million developers rely on Progress to power their applications. Learn about Progress at www.progress.com or +1-800-477-6473.