Facebook Messenger Has More Than 11,000 bots

Facebook Messenger Has More Than 11,000 bots

Facebook just progressed one step closer toward creating its bot desires a reality. Just months after announcing the first bots for Facebook Messenger at F8, the social network now counts more than 11,000 bots on its platform, the company declared. The milestone comes together with some major enhancements to how the bots work inside of Messenger.

Facebook has done 11,000 bots and 21,000 developers constructing them on its Messenger platform, the social networking giant's head of Messenger told CNBC on Friday, after discharging a slew of new features for the service.

Previously this year, Facebook introduced the Messenger Platform - tools to permit developers to make chatbots for the Messenger app. Chatbots are basically automated apps within Messenger that permit a user to convey out tasks such as ordering flowers or finding out the weather, just by talking to this artificial intelligence (AI) system.

“We’re looking forward to building a future of amazing Messenger experiences powered by the community of developers, businesses and people who use Messenger every day,” Facebook’s VP of messaging products David Marcus said in a post on Thursday announcing the figures.

First up, users can now offer star ratings and response for developers for these bots similar to apps. Secondly, with the new fast replies feature that are buttons which talk about to bot’s new messages causing into faster conversations.

Bots will also be capable of sending and replying with audio, video, GIFs, and other files. There is a Persistent menu option for bots that shows offered commands at all times so users don’t have to recollect them.  A new account connecting option will let businesses link their customers’ accounts with their Messenger accounts.

"The idea with payments generally is that we don't want to be in the business of payments, but what we want to do is to create a really frictionless experience so that if you need to buy something on Messenger or even on Facebook, you remove the friction from that especially on mobile," David Marcus, Facebook's head of Messenger, told CNBC in a TV interview.

"That's what we want to do to just to enable our partners to sell more on the platform. We are continuing to develop more solutions to enable that."

“Ratings and reviews are currently shared with only the bot developer through a dashboard in developers.facebook.com and via email,” Marcus wrote.

Chat app makers have quickly added new features in the past six months, both to contend for an audience and to provide accommodations bots. Facebook Messenger, Kik, Skype, and Slack have added button features. And since the start of the year, Skype, Facebook Messenger, and Kik have all produced bot platforms, along with Slack in late 2015. With 900 million users, Facebook Messenger is one of the most-used chat apps on the planet.

Facebook is also securing in a persistent menu that all bot developers can use to support those interrelating with their creations figure out what, exactly, they can do with the bots. Users access the menu by tapping the icon in the corner of Facebook Messenger, and developers can drop in up to five custom actions that users can rapidly drop into their conversations with a bot.

"People can choose to mute a bot just like they can mute a conversation with their friends and they can also provide a star rating and feedback for bot developers. Ratings and reviews are currently shared with only the bot developer through a dashboard in developers.facebook.com (http://developers.facebook.com/) and via email," Facebook describes.