Facebook

When Facebook first introduced bots, there were high hopes. The company hoped to drive a revolution wherein communication would move from primitive channels like e-mail to chat. And it should have work splendidly. After all, Facebook has a very significant percentage of the world’s population as its user and almost everyone who uses the Internet, is well familiar with the social networking website.

Bots for business were a good idea, however, they do not appear to be working as per expectations. For example,  Everlane, who was one of the launch partners for the bot platform, has already moved back to e-mail from bots. There are several reasons behind this unenthusiastic start including the bots themselves. To take care of this issue, Facebook has announced an upgraded messenger platform today that is bringing along a couple of new ways of interacting with bots.

So now, instead of looking for and then attempting to engage a bot in conversation, you can simply open up the persistent menus, chose whatever option suits your purpose, repeat until you are done.

So kind of like this:

What this does is, that it saves users from the trouble of engaging the bot in conversation before it would come up with a menu like this. Now, developers can directly create these menus without the conversation with the bot needing to come into the picture.

The experience is undoubtedly much smoother. You don’t need to type all that much and you can simply tap your way to making a purchase or ordering something. Developers can simply hide the composer screen and force customers to choose out of the available options and avoid chatting with the bot altogether.

So basically, the bots are no longer chat-bots by necessity. You can still use chat of course, buy only if you feel like it is going to be suitable for your business. Otherwise, you can simply go for a nested options interface that allows you to present your user with

The update also brings along a few minor features as listed below.

  • Customized message content for sharing.
  • Sharing capabilities for webview.
  • Bot deep-links for custom message sharing.
  • Messenger Profile API.
  • API for Messenger Codes.
  • Payments pre-checkout event.
  • Addition to app-level analytics.

You can read about them in detail here.

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