Facebook’s F8 developer conference in San Jose, California has seen a fair few announcements from the World’s leading social media platform. One of the biggest of which has been the overhaul of the Messenger app that has seen a huge focus on bot integration and an attempt to bring users and businesses together.
Vice-President of Messenger Product, David Marcus, explained that Messenger will be much more than just a social communication tool. Whilst pointing out that there are over 65 million businesses that use Messenger, Marcus announced a number of new features that will turn Messenger into a 21st Century Yellow Pages.
Discovery Tabs will be new tabs that will allow to search for bots, pages, companies, products, webpages and events near to you.
Messenger Codes will give each business QR codes that will then link to bots.
Chat Extensions will allow users to then converse with bots individually and in group chats. The main example Facebook gave was sharing music whilst talking to Spotify’s bot, which would learn your musical tastes based on your behavior.
M Assistant will now be built right into the app and will be able to make suggestions to the user or perform a number of other tasks including paying other users or ordering food.
