Faceboook has announced a series of tools for developers to make bots inside Facebook messenger. The company made the announcement during its just concluded F8 (developers) conference.
Even though other messaging platforms like Kik, Telegram and Line have since introduced their own bot stores, Facebook’s announcement is significant because of its large user base (900 million monthly active users). This is because once that many people get used to using bots in messenger, there’ll surely be a positive ripple effect for bot development in general.
The tools Facebook announced include an Application Program Interface (API) that would allow developers to build chat bots for messenger and chat widgets for the web.
Facebook believes that bots will soon become the main way we buy from and interact with companies. The reason for this being that users no longer engage with the multitude of apps available, hence IM companies are looking to bots to help customers interact with their preferred vendors within their messaging platforms since they spend most of their time on there.
As a result Facebook is encouraging all companies to build bots for its messaging platform, including media companies. In a demonstration, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg showed bots from CNN and 1-800 FLOWERS and how they’d respond to users’ requests..
What is a chatbot?
A chatbot is simply any computer program designed to interact with users using natural language so that it feels like the human is having a normal conversation with another human. Remember Microsoft’s Clipboard assistant for instance? That’s an example of a chatbot.
So, if you’re a developer, you should be looking to honing your skills in this area and even begin suggesting it to new clients. While we’re still not sure customers will quickly embrace the use of bots, it’ll be wisdom to be prepared to profit from what may just be the next big thing in software development.
Or what do you think?
