To extend their reach beyond online socializing and not to be confined only as an instant messaging service, Facebook on Tuesday incorporated an artificial intelligence powered “bots” into its Messenger application so that the business enterprises and companies can also take part in lifelike text exchanges with their users. The main motto behind introducing this artificially intelligent bots is to stimulate one-on-one conversations between users and companies and to help the businesses and organizations to expand the reach in customer service and enterprise transactions.
Facebook announced this news and introduced the Chatbot in the recently concluded annual developer’s conference in San Francisco and also revealed the number of monthly users of Messenger crossed 900 million. The CEO and the co-founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and also encourage the developers so that they can build bots and could even top the common people’s natural language text conversations. “We think you should be able to text message a business like you would a friend, and get a quick response”
Termed as the automated programs, the Chatbots will help the users communicate with businesses and carry out tasks such as online purchases and will also come with the ability to ”learn” from conversations, getting better at figuring out what people are telling them and how best to respond. “Our goal with artificial intelligence is to build systems that are better than people at perception seeing, hearing, language and so on,” said Zuckerberg .
Not only that, the bots could help the Silicon Valley company to monetize its messaging applications over the time and will provide a new way of interacting with the digital world, potentially shortcutting mobile applications and sidestepping searches over the internet.
Getting Smarter
Messenger already has a built-in Artificial Intelligence and comes with the provision to recognize faces in pictures, suggesting recipients for messages and for filtering out spam texts but Zuckerberg gives stress on the fact “Soon, we are going to be able to do even more”
Zuckerberg promised that the company is looking to build a better Facebook AI would be able to understand what is in the video, pictures or news articles and will give suggestion to the content holder so that he/she could get more likes on the social networking sites.
According to the vice-president of the company, Facebook is currently testing the Bot-building capabilities and some of the latest tools include one for the creation of “high-end, self-learning bots”
“If you want to build more complex bots, you can now use our bot -engine. You feed it samples of conversation, and it’s better over time. You can build your bot today.” Marcus told to the developers.
Bridges, not Walls
Zuckerberg also discussed about the future projects of Facebook and is planning to introduce live video streaming and diving into the virtual reality, apart from the Messenger. “We think we are at the edge of the golden age of video.”
The company recently launched its Live platform to allow developers to stream video content from their applications to audiences at the social network. Zuckerberg himself demonstrated a streaming live video to Facebook while giving speech to the audience with the help of a drone that flew over the invitees.
Zuckerberg promised that Messenger and Live will be developed further in the upcoming years and also emphasized on the fact that the company is looking for introducing the virtual reality technology too; with the collaboration of Facebook owned company Oculus.
At the last part of the conference Zuckerberg went full philosophical and spread messages which most of the political leaders have been failed to convey. Zuckerberg said that this whole initiative has been taken for only one cause and that is to connect the whole world under a single platform and to build bridges not walls.
“If the world starts to turn inward, then our community will have to work even harder to bring people together. Instead of building walls, we can build bridges,”
