Live from F8 — “Group bots” with Messenger Chat Extensions
Today, at the F8 developer conference, Facebook introduced a new type of Messenger bot that allows multiple users to access bots inside of existing conversations on the messaging app.
Facebook calls them chat extensions. They’ll serve not just as group bots, but as an extremely powerful form of smart discovery. Until today, bots were exclusively a 1:1 experience. You would message a bot and only have a singular conversation. Now, with chat extensions, bot developers can create rich experiences directly in-line. Bots can now have full features, similar to apps, and allow for multiple users within a single bot conversation — group conversations.
They’re are two ways to interact with them:
Extension Drawer — This is the most basic use case. For example, you’re chatting with a friend on messenger and you want to share a song you’ve been vibing on. Spotify has a chat extension for that. This is comparable to Apple’s iMessage extensions. The song will play directly inside of Messenger. No need to open the Spotify app.
AI Smart Replies — This is where things start getting interesting. Say you’re in a group chat with your friends and you mention that you’re hungry. Using “M,” Facebook Messenger is able to make a smart suggestion for a bot that can help you. In this example, Open Table to the rescue.
This could be extraordinary powerful. Right off the bat, I think of the following use cases:
- “What should we watch tonight?” Movie suggestion bots.
- “Let’s get away this weekend?” Travel suggestion bots.
- “Want to go see Wicked tonight?” Ticket buying bots.
The list can go on and on. Chat extensions are available in beta starting today. I’m beyond stoked to see this in action, and will definitely be experimenting with use cases over at Black Ops.
Are you at F8 too? Let’s meetup and talk bots. 🤖 Tweet me @madebyblack or ping me on FB messenger:
