Facebook today announced that its bot platform has been used to create 300,000 bots. That’s up from a 100,000 bots milestone reached at the annual developer conference last year. Roughly 200,000 developers have used the Messenger Platform since its launch at F8 two years ago.
When asked, a company spokesperson declined to share the exact number of bots facilitating conversations for small businesses; however, businesses and customers now exchange 8 billion messages a day on Messenger, up from 2 billion this time last year.
The milestone is proof of the concept introduced years ago by Facebook that more customers want to speak with businesses.
“Obviously if we were wrong, then we wouldn’t have eight billion conversations happening,” Messenger head of product Stan Chudnovsky told VentureBeat in an interview.
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Also announced today:
- Facebook will bring augmented reality to Facebook Messenger, starting in closed beta with customers like Kia Motors and Nike sharing their latest cars and shoes via Messenger bots and the app’s camera.
- Additional built-in natural language services from Wit.ai’s NLP.
- The introduction of translations by intelligent assistant M. Suggested translations will begin with Spanish to English and English to Spanish in the United States.
- Facebook will introduce a dating service for users.
More to come.
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