SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook announced today that it was opening up its Messenger platform in beta and now lets chatbots into the app. What this means is that you’re now able to interact with an AI-powered “representative” from a business right on one of the largest conversation service out in the market today.
At the F8 developer conference, David Marcus said that product enhancements on Messenger means that more people are enjoying using it every day. “People love to interact with businesses within Messenger,” he said. “The future we’re going to build will be even more exciting.”
Before the Internet era, Marcus stated, everything was conversational — you had to walk somewhere to get what you wanted. Then the Internet caused interactions at a much larger scale. The mobile era offered stripped down versions of the web into the app society we’re in now. But we download fewer and fewer apps, meanwhile mobile web is frustrating and we also call businesses time to time when we need to deal with urgent issues, but meanwhile Messenger has good properties: instant, persistent identity, in context, and canonical.
To date, Facebook says it has more than 50 million businesses on the social network with more than 1 billion messages sent every month. This is a compelling reason for why the company is pursuing bots within its Messenger app.
Marcus said that the Facebook Messenger Platform allows developers to build bots for Messenger using its send and receive API: All bots will keep your identity, send and receive not only text, but also images, buttons, bubbles, and calls to action. “In order to build a great experience, you need a combination of UI and conversation. We think the combination of UI and conversation is what is going to work,” he explained.
Facebook is offering prominent user controls at the top of every thread that allows you to block specific messages or entire conversations to make sure that “you are always in control of your messaging experience.”
To accelerate development, Facebook has also developed a bot framework.
Some of the bots you have are 1-800 Flowers, Hipmunk, CNN, eBay, Disney, Staples, Shopify, Salesforce, HealthTap, OwnersListens, and more. Marcus says that every the bot engine, documentation, and send/receive API will be available today.
Introducing AI in customer service
Facebook has been investing more resources into Messenger in the past couple of years, especially after extracting it from the core app. And what it has done certainly has seen a massive uptick in adoption by the social network’s 1.59 billion monthly active users, with more than half of them accessing Facebook purely on their mobile device.
Chatbots are meant to engage customers across a medium that they’re fond of, making responses real-time instead of having to trade back and forth communications via email or by phone. It could also enhance the capabilities of Facebook’s “M” personal assistant. In August, the company claimed that M “can actually complete tasks on your behalf. It can purchase items, get gifts delivered to your loved ones, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments, and way more.”
Is this new form of customer service going to stick with brands eager to tap into the massive audience on Facebook Messenger? Some think it’s not the right way to go because it lacks the human interactions that makes it personal. Call center software provider Five9’s vice president of product marketing Mayur Anadkat told VentureBeat that the “complex customer interactions should certainly be left to the live agent who can read the situation and react accordingly.”
He continued: “As brand loyalty and exceptional customer service become the main priority for brands, companies simply cannot afford for bots to completely handle customer service and risk creating a negative experience. With that said, the live customer service representative will always have a place with the overall customer experience.”
However, Yahoo’s senior vice president for product and engineering around advertising and search Enrique Munoz Torres said that companies should embrace bots. He believes that user behaviors have changed: “Users are increasingly more comfortable with conversational interfaces and they expect that systems will be able to handle complex requests.” In addition, messaging is evolving from applications to platforms.
“These developments will definitely impact search,” he continued. “As search becomes increasingly multimodal, messaging can evolve into an important entry point. Moreover, it can drive users to ask questions that they currently would not enter into a search engine, like ‘What should I do this weekend?’. Having bots be able to address these complex questions, let alone complete the actions in a really comprehensive way, would be transformative. We, at Yahoo, find this problem to be fascinating and worth exploring.”
Taking its place in the bot race
Reports first surfaced about chatbots in January with revelations of an SDK that allows developers to build these conversational tools within the popular messaging service.
The launch of chatbots and a live chat API comes a year after Facebook launched its Messenger platform. The goal then was to allow people to express themselves in a new way and make their conversations better. It started off with supporting app deep-linking within conversations, along with 40 different third-party integrations such as Giphy, ESPN, Imgur, and The Weather Channel.
Above: Facebook executive David Marcus onstage at F8, with screens showing the 40 launch partners for the company’s new Messenger Platform. (March 25, 2015)
Image Credit: Facebook livestream
Facebook’s vice president of messaging products David Marcus also revealed an offering called Messenger for Business that mirrored what WeChat has had for a while. With it, users are able to communicate right through Facebook Messenger with participating businesses. Marcus explained that in doing so, the company is helping people “communicate more naturally” and “vastly improve people’s lives.”
In terms of timing, Facebook has taken its time to get into the bot market as many competitors have quickly adopted the technology, including WeChat, Telegram, Kik, Slack, Microsoft and Skype, and Line. However, with more than 900 million users on its Messenger service, Facebook’s impact in the space shouldn’t be ignored as it could have an interesting effect on the industry.
.