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Facebook Messenger takes another swipe at bots

Jessica Guynn
USA TODAY

SAN JOSE — Last year Facebook Messenger oversold how soon chat bots would be able to carry on a human-like conversation to respond to your every need.

Facebook Messenger chief David Marcus

This year at Facebook's annual F8 conference for software developers, the chat app has a new message for its 1.2 billion users: Chat and chat bots can be very useful in your daily lives.

On Tuesday Messenger introduced the capability to have a group chat with a business, meaning you can plan a play list on Spotify, share highlights from NBA games, make a dinner reservation on Open Table or pick flights on Hipmunk for a summer getaway with a group of friends on Messenger without leaving the app.

A discover tab now allows you to search for chat bots on Messenger. And QR codes that can be scanned with Messenger will let you order food at your seat or buy a souvenir sweatshirt during a Golden State Warriors game.

This is all part of Messenger's goal to become the No. 1 spot for people to chat with friends, family and businesses — basically the digital version of the white pages and the yellow pages, says Messenger chief David Marcus.

"This is about solve more day-to-day problems for more people," Marcus told USA TODAY in an interview last week. "The really interesting thing is, when you think about it, a lot of those experiences are not social by nature today."

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The announcements are part of Facebook's strategy to make Messenger the hub of people's daily lives and interactions, much the way messaging services in Asia are where you schedule doctor's appointments, play games, shop for clothes or send money to friends. Marcus says 20 million out of 65 million business pages on Facebook are now responding to consumer queries on Messenger.

Messaging apps increasingly are an important form of communication. More than 2 billion people are projected to become regular users of mobile messaging apps by 2018, according to research firm eMarketer.

Businesses might prefer to interact with consumers through their own proprietary apps but consumers have grown weary of overloading their devices with smartphone apps. More than a quarter of time spent on mobile apps by Americans is on a handful of social networking and communications apps, according to research firm Forrester.

So corporations are looking for more effective ways to reach people where they are spending their time, and increasingly, that's in messaging apps such as Messenger.

100,000 bots

Facebook Messenger made a splash last year when it opened its platform to outside developers to create bots to chat much the way humans do with Messenger users.

About 100,000 chat bots are now active on Messenger, according to Marcus. Some people are already using them to get stock picks, sports scores, book recommendations, weather reports and music release dates from musicians such as Maroon5 and 50 Cent.

Still, most people haven't used these bots to connect with a favorite business or brand or get updates from celebrities. And some of the experiences offered by the bots hasn't lived up to the hype.

Marcus says it will take time for people to grow accustomed to software that uses artificial intelligence to carry on a conversation. And, though having a conversation with a bot isn't always the best way to interact with a business, he expects people to converse with them more and more in coming years.

According to a recent Forrester Research executive survey, just 4% of companies have deployed chat bots, but 31% are testing them or plan to roll them out. The percentage of companies using human-manned chat services is higher, with 17% saying they’re using them on Facebook Messenger.

"Facebook absolutely over promised what bots could do, in part because we were all excited by the idea of artificial intelligent assistants who could do tasks and understand everything we were saying," said Ben Parr, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Octane AI, which builds chat bots.

That technology, he says, doesn't exist yet. But he's convinced it will. Already he says millions of people are talking to bots. And if the evolution of smartphone apps tells us anything, that's a fraction of the potential audience.

It took years for apps to become ubiquitous in our lives and for the smartphone to give birth to a superstar app like Instagram or Snapchat, Parr says.

"I think the same thing is happening now with bots, we are on the same kind of curve."

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