Soon you’ll be able to get all the help you need by chatting with a bot.
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Businesses can also buy “click-to-message” ads that would appear in a person’s Facebook news feed that would route them to a chatbot conversation, Mr. Marcus said. The three main announcements concern the Facebook Live API, Account Kit SDK, and Agents for Messenger.
“It’s a very high-quality, personal environment”, he said in an interview. A set of touch controllers for the Oculus Rift VR headset were announced which will enable Oculus users to interact with content using hand movements for the first time. When Washington, D.C., attorney Samantha Guo visited China recently, the 32-year-old said she was amazed at how extensively her friends used bots and similar technology on the texting service WeChat to pay for meals, order movie tickets and even send each other gifts.
Facebook’s chatbots could also threaten businesses’ individual apps.
“We’re looking to evolve the platform to make more functionality available to developers can build better, and better things”, he said.
That’s the goal of Messenger’s new chatbots. You can ping hotel chain Hyatt with questions about your accommodations, and you can track your purchases through online retailer Everlane.
With its new emphasis on chatting with businesses, Facebook is joining several tech companies working to promote the use of intelligent software programs known as “chatbots”, which let businesses interact with customers in conversational language.
A bot from a company called Poncho can provide daily weather updates based on your location.
The plan for all of Facebook’s products, from messaging to virtual reality, will require building an audience and then getting developers to build an ecosystem of businesses that communicate with that audience. Send a message to mobile shopping start-up Spring. “From there, you can derive that we’re automating more and more”. You can place the order for the 3.1 Phillip Lim jacket right inside the Messenger app.
The company has also released a Bot Engine, which will allow developers to create smarter tools.
CNN wasn’t the only publisher rushing to get a bot out the door today.
“Messenger API and the ability to integrate video and instant messaging into the social interaction will transform Facebook into a global telecommunications player”, Frost & Sullivan Research Manager Michael Jude told TechNewsWorld. Zuckerberg recapped the company’s efforts to reach people who can’t afford the Internet, who aren’t close to Internet service, or who just aren’t aware of all the memes they’re missing. The bot will e-mail stories to people as part of a “read later” feature.
“If I have a problem with a flight today, I call the airline. It’s different from any other speech I’ve given”, he wrote.
Messenger bots will make restaurant and plane reservations much easier, and are not the classic dumb bots everyone was thinking about when the news leaked about Facebook’s intentions.
Bots, he says, are going to change that. I don’t say: “Play my favorite Bruce Springsteen, ‘” Ask said.
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Ticketmaster and Eventbrite, for example, plans to start selling events directly on Facebook later this month.
