14 DAY TRIAL // During its F8 Developer Conference 2016 taking place in San Francisco today, and also tomorrow, Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg announced a new service feature called "bots for Messenger" that will work on the company's already existing Messenger Platform.
The Facebook Messenger Platform was first announced at last year's F8 Developer Conference, but no clear details were provided.
In January 2016, Facebook shed some light on their newest project saying that the Messenger Platform will work as an SDK that will allow businesses to create custom user experiences for customers getting in contact with their service via Facebook's Messenger IM tool.
Forty developers were invited to test out the new SDK and build custom layouts for their Messenger chat windows, in order to customize it to their own business.
AI bots are here to stay
During today's F8 keynote, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg provided another update to its newest endeavor, the so-called "bots on Messenger" feature.
"I've never met anyone that likes calling a business, and no one wants to install a new app for every service or business they want to interact with," said Zuckerberg. "So we think you should be able to message a business in the same way you message a friend."
"It should get a quick response, and it shouldn't take your full attention like a phone call would, and you shouldn't have to install a new app," Zuckerberg added. "So today we're launching Messenger Platform, so you could build bots for Messenger."
These bots will be powered by Facebook's powerful AI engine, to which developers will be tapping in via an API, and creating automated conversation bots that they can deploy on a per-user basis inside the Messenger window for all users that get in contact with their business.
Zuckerberg hopes bots revolutionize the apps ecosystem
Zuckerberg hopes that these apps will make it much simpler for users to get updates or answers from various services, freeing the users from installing apps on their phone, or talking to customer support personnel.
Like the last time, the company provided early access to a series of companies such as CNN, Poncho, Spring, and 1-800-FLOWERS. Currently, there are already a few apps you can test out, and they are quite useful, to be truthful about it.
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. The social networking giant hopes that bots will cut down, even more, the dead time spent carrying out mundane tasks such as shopping, searching for news stories, or weather forecasts.
Somehow this reminds us of Microsoft and Yahoo's big-time plans for widgets and Google's similar plans for iGoogle. I wonder how those projects turned out.
