Today at Facebook's annual global developer conference in San Francisco, the company gave outside developers coding tools and tips on how to build chatbots, or text-based interactive services, for the Messenger mobile app.
The goal is to build automated software programs that can respond to brief text messages and handle the routine parts of customer queries, saving human agents for more complicated requests. Basic conversational bots can fetch standardized answers to straightforward questions, usually with the help of artificial intelligence.
In recent months, KLM became the first airline to use Messenger to provide boarding passes and customer service. Overnight, after the channel opened, questions directed at the airline jumped by 40%.
Facebook’s Messenger may appeal to businesses because it has a pre-existing connection with more than 900 million people a month. No additional app is required for customers to interact.
Businesses will not be able to initiate conversations on Messenger. But there's talk of building "Sponsor Messages" as a way for brands to re-engage with customers who had previously chatted with them.
Facebook's bot platform is distinct from the virtual assistant that it is testing, called M, and which will rely on a mix of human help and artificial intelligence to handle queries. (See our earlier story, A glimpse at what Facebook Messenger and M might do for travel.)
Questions hang over Facebook's chatbot effort. The company earned a mixed reputation for how it has treated developers of applications for its previous platforms. But it may have learned from some of its missteps.
Another worry: Building chatbots is easier said than done. Human variations in ways of making requests and in their nuanced expectations of answers has foiled many efforts at natural-language based interfaces, to date.
Yet bot-based platforms are clearly a trend travel companies will have to reckon with. The model of using messaging apps as a commerce platform was paved by WeChat, a messaging app in China that enables users to book to travel, order pizza, and do other transactions.
A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft invited developers to create similar bots for its Skype messaging platform, with hotel brand Westin showing off a prototype bot assistant.