Facebook has declared during its F8 meeting about a new collection of the bots which work in the environment of the group chats of Messenger. These bots allow users to remain informed about the real-time latest news like sports, business, game’s progress and much more, as per the three main sources familiar with the production of this feature.
Facebook has already started working with the top chatbot developers for creating the platform for the release. The company has opened up APIs to let much amount of developers to initiate creating the collective bots.
For instance, a chat group on Messenger consisting of the football fans can add the sports bot to the conversation, where it can notify the users about score changes, big scores, and other game related news. Similarly, an e-commerce group chat includes the group of fellows who work together and can discuss the status of shares and get notified about any new big change in stock exchange.
Facebook Messenger has already included the feature related to sports bots using the property of TheScore and the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, and the food delivery bots like the Dominos.
The group chat bots release has the two big issues with the usage of Messenger, as reported by TechCrunch.
Firstly, the group chat bots serve more like the new tickers than to act like a human discussion fellow. They are not actual chatbots, rather they are just information bots and users can’t have to and fro chats with them as they can have with real chatbots.
This issue is that the feature of chatbots got overhyped very quickly. The fundamental abilities of the feature at the moment are not good enough to take the place of conventional app dashboards and interfaces. As these group chatbots don’t serve as the sole chat partner, there will be less stress on them to perform like humans, and they have specific utilities.
Second, the presence of bots in group chats plays a very vital role in terms of growth mechanism, which don’t have easier discovery channels.
Currently, users need to write the name of the bot in Messenger’s search to initiate the conversation with it. There no way to browse the bots, so many businesses have to either get the exact name of bot or to get them to start a chat with bot via Facebook news feed ad.
