Facebook’s relationship with chatbots has been more than a little tumultuous. While these bots are thriving on many other platforms, with Facebook, the relationship has not managed to achieve much success. Undaunted, the company is now launching a brand new Discover section that ostensibly will let people discover new bots to interact with.
The company first announced the new feature at the F8 conference and it is reportedly going live even as we speak. Once you open the section up, you will be able to see a slew of new bots divided across different categories, There are even featured bots that have been curated by the company as worthy of your attention.
Why is Facebook so keen on bots? Well, if businesses do come to adopt this medium as their own, Facebook as the facilitator will stand much to gain. And for this to happen, the bots must be popular or at the very east, useful. They certainly weren’t so the last time around and this is probably part of why Facebook had to launch a platform for them this time around.
Bots certainly have potential bu in many cases, they appear to lack the intelligence part. I mean it is all well and good to hope to conduct your business through Facebook Messenger, via chats, However, when things come down to brass tacks, it is not as easy as it sounds, Humans sometime have trouble resolving customer queries over chat, so it is likely that so will chatbots.
The whole idea is to make the experience of shopping, or availing services easier for the humans at the other end. Easier then going to a website, or an app to obtain the same results. The last time around, Facebook failed in its mission. Let’s hope the bots available through Discover will be able to perform their tasks better this time around. A lot will also depend upon the developers, who will be under pressure to come up with better stuff for Discover.
