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| Facebook announced a revamped version of its Messenger app on Tuesday that puts bots front and center for users and businesses |
Credit: Kathleen
Chaykowski
Facebook first opened up its
Messenger platform last April to help businesses, nonprofits and organizations
better communicate with users. Since, 100,000 developers have built more than
100,000 bots on the app, the company said on Tuesday, helping users do
everything from check the weather, to make restaurant reservations, follow the
news or order flowers.
While the quality of bots has been
mixed, a year later, Facebook announced at its annual F8 developer conference
on Tuesday in San Jose, Calif. that it is rolling out a revamped version of its
Messenger app that puts bots front and center of the user experience. The
features could help Facebook, which now has 5 million active advertisers, build
a wider, more active user base and fend off competition from companies like Google
and Twitter. Tuesday's updates are aimed at helping Messenger "reinvent
the way people and businesses are communicating," as Facebook's VP of
messaging David Marcus put it last year.
"We knew we had something great
in the making, and we enabled developers to send richer content like
GIFs," Marcus said onstage on Tuesday. "People prefer to use
Messenger to interact with companies."
Some of the key new tools on the 1.2
billion-person app include a "Discover" tab for finding relevant and
recently used bots (developers can apply to have their bot featured in the tab,
which is available from the home screen); QR codes that can be used at events
like sports games that people can scan to learn more from a Messenger bot;
"chat extensions" for businesses like Spotify, TheScore, OpenTable
and Kayak that allow a group thread to chat with a bot together; automated
suggestions by Facebook's virtual assistant "M," for example, to
receive a reminder to meet a friend, or a recommendation in a group thread on
where to grab dinner; and new game bots that make it easier to play with
friends in Messenger.
Messenger also launched a series of
bot tools for businesses. New "smart replies" let businesses
with Pages use Facebook's AI bot engine to automatically respond to frequently
asked questions such as business hours and contact details. The smart replies
API gives businesses the ability to create an AI responder, powered by
Facebook's Wit.ai team, to answer other frequently asked questions.
To support QR codes, Facebook is
letting businesses create multiple, different QR codes for the same bot so
that businesses can track where each code was scanned. A restaurant, for
example, could apply a different code to each table at a restaurant. Facebook
is also rolling out features for businesses to make it easier to manage
conversations with multiple bot developers, for example, enabling a businesses
to run a personal shopping bot and a customer service bot built by
different vendors.
"We hope that Messenger
Platform 2.0 will enable our developer community to enhance experiences,
leverage the power of AI and build more bots to help businesses connect in more
meaningful ways," Facebook said in a statement before Tuesday's keynote.
Facebook said the updates will begin
rolling out on Tuesday.
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