How Facebook's Big Bet On Chatbots Might Remake The UX Of The Web

Enter The 2016 Innovation By Design Awards now through May 5! At F8, Facebook's massive annual developer conference, the big news is bots—specifically bots on Messenger, Facebook's messaging app. Messenger now boasts 900 million users per month, which presents a tantalizing user base for companies eager to get their wares in front of customers. That's where the bots come in. Facebook is turning Messenger into an open platform, and any company can now build a chatbot that users can talk with. If you're an airline, you can build a chatbot to book tickets; if you're OpenTable you can build a chatbot to take reservations. "To me it's about bringing back all the best parts of the interaction between people and businesses," David Marcus, vice president of messaging products at Facebook, says in an interview. "What we're trying to build with bots are rich conversational experiences. That's what we believe will be the future of interactions and services." The chatbots are designed to guide you through a lightweight user flow that doesn't leave you guessing about what to do next. All Roads Lead to Messenger Chatbots seem like a new fad in software design: Microsoft just announced its own suite of bot-building tools; Kik, the messaging platform massively popular among teens, announced one as well. But there are deep reasons why chatbots make sense. The app model has stalled out: People don't use a ton of apps, and they don't download many either. The reason is simple:... Continue reading at 'Fast Company'

[ Fast Company | 2016-04-12 00:00:00 UTC ]
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