At its annual developers conference this week, Facebook announced the Bots for Messenger project, which has been hinted about for months.
Developers will be able to create bots that will automatically interact with customers. Chat bots are chat robots, interactive software powered by artificial intelligence that are designed to simulate human conversation. Facebook’s goal is to make their bots conversational and helpful for users. Facebook wants users to be able to message businesses, brands and publishers like they would message a friend and they want messenger to become a one stop shop for everything.
CNN is an early user of the bots, creating a bot so that when a user messages a topic such as “presidential election.” CNN will be able to message back links to related stories and information.
Spring, an e-commerce site is also an early user of bots and has created a Personal Shopper bot that will serve up personalized suggestions based on your shopping preferences and send a confirmation when users make purchases on Spring.
Another early user is 1-800-Flowers. Users can ask the bot for suggestions and order flowers through Facebook messenger without ever having to call 1-800-Flowers.
There are 900 million users are Facebook messenger every month which opens up a huge net of possibility for businesses who are looking for more ways to connect without having to be on the app 24 hours a day.
For users who aren’t interested in messaging their favorite brands, they will be able to mute and block any brands or businesses they don’t want to hear from.
Users can be able to check the weather, check into flights, get traffic notifications, order items, receive receipts and much more through messenger. Bots are already in use on Facebook messenger and we will probably see much more of them in the coming months.
