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When Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed from F8 2019 that "the future is private …", he could have added "… messaging apps, some of which are owned by us." By the time the social heavyweight focuses on privacy With regard to the digital living room concept instead of the digital city square, the focus is on the company's strong portfolio of courier and social services based on applications. What has not been mentioned throughout the F8 is how changes can affect chatbots.
Chatbots can provide an extension of Facebook Messenger's capabilities by adding an artificial intelligence layer to the interactions between a user and a company. A simplistic example is to book a haircut or a table in a restaurant. This type of interaction can be automated. Doing it with a chatbot can give customers the feeling of having interacted with the business rather than a faceless calendar system.
There are huge business opportunities there; the market is expected to reach $ 8 billion in 2022 (or, for example, $ 7.7 billion in 2025 or less, depending on which analyst you ask for). And by next year, 85% of online customer interactions could be handled by chatbots, according to Gartner.
At the same time, Facebook is injecting resources into parts of its platform that are not the current thread. Messenger undergoes a complete rebuild, for example, as well as a multiplatform desktop application and message threads. Facebook's messaging services are increasingly tightly integrated with each other – suggesting that this was about to happen. For example, WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption arrives in Messenger. WhatsApp video calls arrive on the smart screen of the portal. Etc.
Perhaps the most predictive of a future where the boundaries between Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram will get blurry is the next Friends tab of Messenger, which will show you what your friends are doing on other platforms. social. "So, if you follow someone on Instagram, you will see their stories.If you are friends with someone on Facebook, you would like to see their posts and their stories, and it will work private updates from friends, no public content, "said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the F8 scene.
Boon or bear?
From the users' point of view, all this is exciting, but what would happen if you developed a business based on this system, which will change dramatically in the next year? ManyChat, a chatbot company that has just raised $ 18 million in funding, is uniquely positioned to experience the unification of Facebook's messaging application. Ethan Kurzweil, a Bessemer partner who has put some of the recent funding in place, said presumably: "The pull of ManyChat on Facebook Messenger is just the beginning. With Instagram, WhatsApp, RCS and others on the horizon, the scale potential is endless. "
ManyChat claims more than one million registered accounts reaching 350 million people and manages about 7 billion customer messages each month on Messenger. Focused primarily on small and medium-sized businesses, the company said its service is needed in areas ranging from e-commerce to online services, beauty salons and restaurants, and says its 80% open rate are four times what you expect from traditional email marketing.
It would be undesirable to disrupt this momentum, but ManyChat's co-founder and CEO, Mikael Yang, seems excited, not intimidated, about the possibilities offered by the unification of Facebook's messaging application. "Obviously we still have a lot to learn about the details, but if you think about the challenge of technical integration – having to integrate a back-end against three – [it] This will greatly simplify our engineering efforts. In other words, the planned expansion of society to more platforms could accelerate.
Although it seems that neither ManyChat nor the other chatbot manufacturers have contacted us for technical details at the moment – it is possible that they discovered the news of the messaging platform at the same time than ourselves – they all share the same optimism.
Hussein Fazal, co-founder and CEO of Snaptravel, told VentureBeat: "In theory, a developer would be able to rely on a unified API, allowing customers to contact them regardless of the email application that they prefer to use. This should make it possible to create and deploy conversation experiences on the platform faster and easier. "
Joshua March, CEO of Conversocial, said pretty much the same thing and also pointed out that only one underlying platform would simplify everything. "Today, managing the complexity of multiple platforms with different APIs and rules can be difficult," he said.
Curiously, Facebook did not specify this much when we spoke to us, saying only: "We are in the early days of taking into account interoperability in our product offering and it is too early to speculate on future products. "
The other benefits of unification
More globally, the unification of Facebook's email applications has other advantages. The purpose of these chatbots is to improve the interactions between customers and businesses to enable them to connect more efficiently and effectively. The integration of several chat services therefore only streamlines this process. "The main advantage lies less in technical integration than in helping companies to engage in a unique dialogue with customers on all three platforms, which will be greatly simplified with a single server." Yang said. "A customer can buy a product on Instagram and get help with Messenger without losing context in the exchange."
March, from Conversocial, told VentureBeat that "the integration will also facilitate platform innovation on new features, which is vital because they compete with other messaging applications and seek to provide more commercial farms. Default end-to-end encryption of all messaging applications will be important for customers and brands (where a service becomes safer to use while making users happy) and discusses future payment capabilities. "The seamless and secure integration of payments into the messaging, as demonstrated by the demonstration for WhatsApp Business, will be a major asset for the brand's trade conversation experiences."
It's unclear when all these features will be deployed, but it's clear that the end result will be more integration between Facebook's email applications, including on the desktop and through the portal. For chatbot makers who are exploiting Facebook's platforms, the more integrated these applications are, the better, at least in theory.
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