Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the arrival of chat bots for Facebook Messenger at the annual F8 Facebook developer conference Tuesday, as well as the addition of a persistent Facebook Live tab to the Facebook home screen and the launching of a satellite to grant internet access to Sub-Saharan Africa.
That's Mark Zuckerberg, just holding a solar-powered plane engine. Because @Facebook builds planes now. #F8 pic.twitter.com/Nke50YxG6v
— Natalie DiBlasio (@ndiblasio) April 12, 2016
The bots on Messenger may have the most immediate impact on Facebook users in the first world however. The idea seems to be a development of an App Store, where instead of ordering a meal through an official app, you could message the Postmates or Favor chatbot using native language and have the meal be delivered to your address.
This extra step of convenience could be a huge boon for Facebook, and could steal some of Apple’s clout in the marketplace. Without the need to navigate to an app store, download an app and then have to sign up for the service, bots on Messenger may have just got rid of a significant barrier to user acquisition for third-party app developers.
These bots will be able to support carousels, meaning users could swipe through different products without leaving the Messenger page, templates for receipts and such, and integration with the newsfeed ads, meaning users will be able to navigate directly from their newsfeed into an app-lite portal without having to install anything.
A persistent search bar at the top of Messenger will allow users to search for apps, and links/names/codes can be used by developers to share their Messengers with users as well.
Daily digests can be sent through the bots on Messenger platform, for stuff such as weather (Poncho The Cat) or news (CNN), and the system is capable of answering follow-up questions. Facebook is opening up its “M” AI assistant service to developers to allow their chat bots to be capable of doing this.
Facebook also announced the introduction of AccountKit, which means exciting things for anyone who hates logging into things on the internet with passwords. Much like Facebook changed the game with the Facebook login plugin, AccountKit will allow third-party app developers to implement a SMS login for their apps.
This means that users will enter in their phone numbers, and then enter the code they received to log into an app. According to Facebook, one Indian streaming service beta testing the service discovered user acquisition went up by 33 percent with the feature.
Also shown off at the conference was Zuckerberg’s new solar powered plane, which has twice the wingspan of a 737, flies at 60,000 feet for three months and is capable of providing internet access to large swaths of area at once.
