Facebook announces bot platform at keynote f8 conference

The era of the bots is finally here. Recently, Microsoft announced a bot platform and chat bots for Skype in its build conference last month. Today, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced chat bots for its Messenger app. From now onwards, developers will be able to integrate their own chat bots inside the Facebook Messenger app. Facebook believes that its Messenger app can become the primary medium for communication between businesses and their customers.

Through the use of artificial intelligence, businesses will now be able to move away from the 1-800 hotlines for customer support. The chat bots for each business will be integrated into Messenger and through this, the business will be able to provide 24/7 customer support to its customers.

Facebook also announced an API to allow developers to build chat bots on its Messenger platform. Even though Facebook’s primary focus was on bots for commerce, the platform is also open for the media and related entities. If there’s anything that has to do with continuous information exchange, the chat bots can help. In the demonstration that Zuckerberg showed, he previewed the 1-800-FLOWERS and CNN bots. The 1-800-FLOWERS bot allows a user to place an order using conversational language (just as you would on the phone). According to Zuckerberg, “you never have to call 1-800-FLOWERS again.”

According to Zuckerberg, this initiative is a 10 year roadmap. Very soon you’ll be able to see numerous chat bots integrated into your Messenger app. These will allow you to interact with the popular businesses and media platforms around the globe in a whole new manner.