I don't understand the difference here, but there must be one. With the Azure QnA Maker, I can create a list of questions and interact with the Knowledge Base via an API and get answers back. What additional features does the Bot Service offer?
2 Answers
QnA service can only retrieve answers from the Knowledgebase, nothing else. You can think it as a fancier Database, you can query it using human language.
Bot Service is the application layer, you can build other business logic in this layer to make your Bot looks smarter. e.g. User asks "What's the weather tomorrow", when your bot service receives this message, you can call the weather API to get the weather, instead of forwarding the question to the QnA service. The bot service also provides interfaces to integrate with different chat channels like Teams, Slack, etc.
Of course, you can do much more in the bot service based on your own business needs. If your bot is solely used for QnA, this layer indeed will seem to be a thin layer wrapper.
The Azure Bot service is just a bot managing SaaS which offers multiple things like ability to automatically push you bot onto multiple channels(teams, slack, facebook etc.) without needing to code the adaptors. It also offers other services like hosting your bot onto the Azure cloud servers and other services like LUIS (Microsoft's NLU), QnA maker, speech service etc.
The web channels adaptor is mostly free which the bot hosting and other services are paid