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Bots are coming to Facebook Messenger, including ones that let you shop online

By Koh Wanzi - on 13 Apr 2016, 6:54pm

Bots are coming to Facebook Messenger, including ones that let you shop online

Facebook Messenger bot

Remember the bots (and the racist Tay chat bot) Microsoft said it wanted to help build? In a not so surprise move, Facebook has now announced the launch of its Messenger Platform in beta, which will come with its share of bots.

Facebook Messenger has around 900 million monthly users, which means that there is a huge user base just waiting to take advantage of the new functionality that bots could bring. At its F8 developer conference last year, Facebook said that Messenger could become a platform to connect businesses with their customers, and it now believes that bots could open up a new channel for commerce, customer support, and maybe even publishing.

In order to usher in what it hopes will be an era of bots, Facebook announced new tools, including an API that allows developers to build chat bots for Messenger and chat widgets for the web. In addition, bots can provide services like weather and traffic updates, and customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications, and live automated messages. Something called Wit.ai's Bot Engine even enables more complex bots that can interpret intent from natural language and get smarter over time.

While the primary focus of the bots appears to be on commerce, it could prove immensely useful for media outlets as well. In a demonstration on stage, CEO Mark Zuckerberg showcased bots from CNN and a floral and gourmet foods retailer called 1-800-Flowers. The CNN bot sent news stories that grew more personalized over time, while the flowers demo showed that it was possible to order flowers using conversational language.

Facebook Messenger bot

However, bots aren’t actually new, and messaging apps like Telegram and Kik already have stores for you to add bots to their respective apps. But Facebook’s announcement is a big deal because of the sheer size of its user base. When bots arrive on Messenger, almost one billion people could have the chance to interact with one.

User numbers are everything in software development, and if Messenger’s users end up embracing bots, you can be sure that we will eventually be drowning in more bots than we care to use.

There are just a couple of caveats. For one, after Microsoft’s Nazi chat bot’s disastrous outing, image-conscious brands and businesses may be wary about entrusting their customers to a bot. There also appear to be some teething problems. Poncho the “weathercat”, a weather bot that Facebook demonstrated at F8, typically “replies within an hour”. Then there’s the Wall Street Journal’s bot, which reportedly takes up to five minutes to respond to a request for top news.

Source: Facebook

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