A new route for financial institutions looking to build virtual assistants could soon open.

Microsoft’s new conversational engine powered by artificial intelligence and natural language processing will be made available to outside developers through the Bot Framework, as well as other Azure cloud-based surfaces, the company announced at its event in Seattle this week.

During the event, Microsoft demonstrated virtual agent technology that it said stretches beyond the restrictions of self-contained commands and manually curated sets of skills to what it called “a truly conversational experience,” in which the context of one interaction carries into the next.

“It crosses skill boundaries, connecting together back-end services, both within Microsoft and externally,” Microsoft stated in a blog post. “And it’s aimed towards a future where every organization has their own agents with their own unique contexts, just like they have their own websites and apps today, and where those agents can seamlessly inter-operate.”

A description of the Bot Framework SDK on web-based hosting service GitHub, owned by Microsoft, helps explain the significance of opening up the technology to outside developers:

With the Bot Framework SDK, you can build bots that converse free-form or your bot can also have more guided interactions where it provides the user choices or possible actions. The conversation can use simple text or more complex rich cards that contain text, images and action buttons. You can add natural language interactions and questions and answers, which let your users interact with your bots in a natural way.

The video below, shared at the Build event, showcased some potential use cases for the new technology from conversational AI firm Semantic Machines, which Microsoft acquired in 2018.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, in his keynote talk, said 95% of Fortune 500 companies are already building on Azure. Financial services clients include Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, as well as TD Bank Group, Finastra and ABN AMRO Bank.

During Microsoft’s third-quarter earnings call last month, Amy Hood, EVP and CFO, said that operating expenses in Enterprise Services increased 22%, driven largely by continued investment in cloud and AI engineering as well as GitHub, while operating income for the segment increased about the same amount. Revenue for the segment grew 4%.