As Messenger’s bots lose steam, Facebook pushes menus over chat
Messenger announced platform updates and everyone has something to say about it. Lots to unpack here, worth a read, and more importantly, to take a moment to formulate opinions. Our thought is these changes were necessary for a number of reasons--users stil need to be trained in how to use a bot (that’s why we now include a brief tutorial at the beginning of all ours--see for yourself with our Kia Niro bot). But it also comes with drawbacks, that might lead to the proliferation of very simple subscription-based bots based on RSS, Youtube, etc. that may damage the concept of bots as just a dummy automated marketing tool. The writer of this article seems perplexed by the option to remove the text input field for certain questions, but we think this is actually pretty useful (and something we’d already implemented with our own web widget months ago). Little steps like this nudge users in the direction they should be going vs. confusing them with too many possibilities. Now if only Messenger could do more to highlight its code scanner, that would be great. More thoughts on this soon.
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