Facebook told the media about a slew of new features landing on its Messenger platform to support developers in their implementation of chatbot capabilities.
The social media company touts that the improvements will increase user interaction and engagement.
From the list of novelties, worthy of mention are customer account linking targeted at online ventures and dynamic buttons enabling fast user replies. Facebook Messenger will also receive better support for audio and video files, alongside feedback and user ratings.
The enterprise also updated its guidelines for bot development and opened up a depository of resources for developers, which contain case studies, tips and Q&A series featuring businesses and brands that are already experienced in crafting Messenger bots.
Facebook Messenger's new features include the following:
Ratings
Users will be able to rate bot developers in a star-system. Only the bot developers will have access to the reviews and ratings via a dashboard in developers.facebook.com and through email.
Quick Replies
The feature is there to guide fresh users in their first interactions with the bots and help them adjust their expectations on the bot interaction. As quick replies feature 10 dynamic buttons, it becomes easier for businesses to have automated conversations with people.
This should provide a clean way for developers to manage the messages by only showing the important responses.
Persistent Menu
The feature works hand in hand with the need for consistency and bot re-engagement. An additional advantage is that people do not have to remember text commands, and it also plays nice with restarting the flow or invoking settings.
Account Linking
By using a protocol that connects businesses to their customers' accounts via Messenger accounts, a range of deeper and closer experiences are being created. Users must opt in to start this experience.
More Content Types
Each brand communicates differently, and some file types hit the mark better than others. Some campaigns rely on GIFs, others on audio or video files.
More Control
Users will have full range of control, with the ability to mute bots just as they would mute a standard conversation. They can also use a star rating system to offer feedback to bot developers.
Facebook introduced bot support in April, and more than 11,000 chatbots were developed since then. More than 23,000 developers took to the challenge to use and perfect the company's natural language bot engine.
