Chatty for facebook messenger
You can have text conversations with all of your friends using the popular social network. Facebook Messenger is the official Facebook app. Just don't expect them to banter about the weather anytime soon.Facebook Messenger.
Chatty for facebook messenger update#
This week's update also yielded ways for developers to make the prefab menu trees more flexible and adaptive to the context of a given discussion, among other tweaks. The general scale-back doesn't mean that the bots aren't getting at least marginally smarter, though. Of more than 20 companies that rolled out Facebook bots or announced intentions to do so in the first week of their launch - many of which had partnered with the social network for the unveiling - nearly half of their bots are now either ostensibly still in the works, mothballed or otherwise unaccounted for. The research firm concluded in its most recent report on the state of the practice that its hype as a "world-changing technology" has led to a "peak of inflated expectations" that have gone largely unmet. Instead, judging from that admittedly small sample, bots seem to be most useful for regularly scheduled and customized doses of information from media companies or lifestyle brands, quizzes, and novelty gags.Ī recent Forrester survey found that only four percent of digital business professionals use any sort of chatbot. While Facebook's initial pitch to businesses stressed the customer-service capabilities of bots, a glance at a couple dozen or so featured in the Messenger app revealed very few used for retail purposes. Over time, there seems to have been a little mission creep. Many of the features Facebook has since added have seemed to be about walking back the pretense of a free-ranging, colloquial AI to a more structured and practical utility.
The result was that trying to get certain bots to do anything beyond the most basic of functions felt like groping for a light switch in a dark room. The initial version of the CNN bot last April was not the most versatile. The Information reported last week that Facebook is rethinking its development efforts on all automation fronts after research showed bots failed to adequately address 70 percent of customer questions and requests. The move may signal a sweeping change in Facebook's attitude towards bots after a buzzy push that's generally failed to live up to the company's lofty promises.
Facebook admits that because many users had no idea the button was there, many developers ignored it. This stripped-down format has been available to bot-makers for the better half of a year, but users could previously only access it through an easily overlooked icon. "Consider stripping such exchanges down and cutting to the chase by putting the most important features in your menu." "You may have been tempted to use the conversational flow to present your bot's main features and flows," a Facebook spokesperson writes in a blog post announcing the change. The company is encouraging developers to make their Messenger bots less chatty with a new format option that strips them down to the nuts and bolts: interactive menus of clickable options in place of a keyboard. It knows you don't always relish these intimate encounters of the bot kind.Īt least that's the message the social network is sending with a new update to its bot-maker toolkit. That's only after you've gone through the confusing hassle of finding the bot and, in some cases, awkwardly making the first move.įacebook, it seems, gets that. Facebook's new emoji are finally available to everyone