Take cover. Mark Zuckerberg announced today that Facebook is about to open up the Messenger platform to businesses and pages, allowing them to build customised chatbots which let customers do everything from seek information to purchase products, entirely through the Messenger app itself.
Messenger is used by 900 million people every month, which is lots. They demonstrated the new feature with U.S. flower business 1-800-Flowers, which will have a chatbot which allows Messenger users to chat with a friendly florist chatbot who can send flowers to loved ones. Great! Wonderful! If there’s a violent robot uprising, we won’t have to fear the robot florist.
Zuckerberg reckons chatting to business chatbots will be addictive and that you’ll “spend way more money than you want on this,” which strikes me as a bizarre sales pitch. Why don’t you just send your robot army to rob me blind, Zuckerberg? Why wait, punk?
It’s like SmarterChild were it a vicious robo-capitalist.
Facebook also announced a nice-looking 360º camera which is intended to work in tandem with your Oculus Rift VR headset, allowing you to jump in to your photos and videos as if you were actually there. So if you want to relive those bathroom selfies as pure phenomena, you can. Wow.
Source: The Guardian.
Photo: The Matrix.
