Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg described that bots is a way to increase the speed and efficacy of interactions between businesses and users on the social network’s messenger platform. Just recently, the social media giant heralded the promise of chatbots, while also acknowledging that the technology is still in its infancy stages, albeit it is already being well-received by many. When using the AI, for instance, it will allow businesses to reply to their customers without having a representative to be there at the moment of inquiry.
CEO of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg Stated the Importance of Chatbots
Mark Zuckerberg spoke to investors after the company’s quarterly earnings announcement, and he says the following in his statement: “We can look at responses businesses give and automate them [with bots] to help decrease latency.” The CEO calls the instance when people have already messaged businesses but will have to wait for a reply from the firm’s representative as “latency.” This is the time between query and answer.
In order to accomplish this, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sees artificial intelligence (AI) to have a vital role in mining and harvesting conversations between businesses and the social networking portal’s Messenger application’s 900-million monthly active users. “We’re going to build AI to help automate responses for users,” Zuckerberg said.
Sheryl Sanberg, COO, described the benefits of chatbots even further. She explains that the social media giant is following and improving upon behavior that is already taking place on their messaging platform. “Businesses and consumers are using Messenger (click here if you want to solve issue Messenger word effects not showing) to connect to each other in a more personal and more immediate way,” the COO said.
Sanberg also cited that the chatbot technology, which was already announced earlier during the F8 event that happened earlier this month, as underpinning this effort. “Bots, [while still] very early, but giving the opportunity for more personal interactions between businesses and people.” She refers to the beta launch of Bot Engine, which will allow developers to teach chatbots on how the AI is able to answer questions. There is also the Send/Receive API tool, which would let “businesses to send immediate responses to common questions including engaging images and calls-to-action, as well as text.”
Even though Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and perhaps the rest of the Facebook developing team has high hopes for the new AI, the earliest bots are not fulfilling their promise yet. “In terms of timing, this is really early,” the COO said.