Facebook messenger has come up with bots in . There are several good things for a bot in a messenger chat. Bots aka chat bots are programmed to reply automatically to a user query. There can be chat bots, voice bots and others. For a complex query a bot may require further human help depending on how it has been programmed. Facebook messenger can be accessed on web as well as app. Bots work on both platforms.
Facebook has a lot of social data, relation (friends) data. With billion+ user on platform messenger users can do a lot with bots. At this time bots can do one to one chat and bots for group feature is not available. Facebook has linked bot creating with Facebook Pages. A FB page with the linking to FB app can create a bot. People/users communicate with FB page (like sending message to FB page). If the page is acting as a bot then user gets auto replies.
Persistent Menu
For bots admin can set persistent menu by sending commands. This gives quick chat links for users. These could be inform of a text, postback, url.
Chat
User can chat and Bots using AI can reply. Text, Images, Videos can be send by bots. Images as normal images or multiple images with name, link can be send. These images can have links which could be postback, text, share. At this time text replied by bot can’t be formatted like colour, bold, italics, underline etc.
Before a user starts chatting with a Bot, chat screen can show a Welcome/Start message. FB sends user id which is not FB User Id but a unique User Id for that User and that Bot. For same user and different Bot this User Id would be different. If admin has subscribed the bot for Subscribed Messages Permission then Bot can send messages to users as well but only after a User has initiated a chat earlier. Bots can be based on AI and pre-defined commands/keywords. Many bots would be working on certain commands only like PRODUCT name, SEARCH term, PRICE name etc.
Apps, Apps and How Many Apps
My earlier article on above topic seems to be fit with Bots. There are many apps, many more are coming for different uses, information etc. How many apps a user will download, access, find on phone? Bots can provide quick and refined information for many things, do some tasks as well. As FB has a lot of data, such data may be available to bots in future. Bots can return google result, wikipedia data, movies info, do bookings and more. When users are generally looking for data then bots can be useful.
Bots can be used by businesses to share data about them selves. Users can query on bot about various products, data, contact info from business. Customer Care can also be created using Bots.
Will cover soon in an another article on Basic code in PHP for creating a messenger bot and replying to a user with text, image & images and setting persistent menu.