Messenger Platform 2.1 Brings New Tools to Enrich Conversations

Oh boy! Lots to unpack here. First, NLP integration that comes out of the box in Messenger (powered by wit.ai, naturally). It seems API.ai won the fight for the channel-agnostic NLP, and Facebook may center its NLP effort for Messenger. Next--the handoff tool. This is a very good move to not do workarounds for coordination, or complex API integrations. Then you have custom CTA Buttons on the fanpage, which is another small step forward in discoverability, not to mention this beautiful thing: “CTA options let people know what to expect when they start a conversation with a business.”. The last two points are Messenger’s Desktop webviews (wasn’t that a pain?!) but we’re curious about their update to policy enforcement notifications: foreshadowing to an upcoming housecleaning of spammy notifications?

AI Is Inventing Languages Humans Can’t Understand. Should We Stop It?

Wanna feel unsettled today? Read this! Also, the language they invented is kind of hilarious, too. 

Why Marketers Are Betting on Bots

For anyone at a brand or looking to build bots for brands, this is a great peek into how they’re approaching things, who early winners are, and what may be on the horizon. Couple things of note here. For starters, the Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas’s Rose chatbot built by R/GA is described as “both a concierge and a housekeeping aide in guest services.” This is nuanced but an extremely important indicator of the future of bots, that it’s never just a bot for a specific thing, so much as adding AI across the entire user experience (rolled out in phases, of course). We also found it interesting that this article refers to the Discover tab as a place “where users can easily access their most recently used bots”--is that ultimately the best use for this? And we always love a good pricing exposition: “bot development costs significantly less—roughly a third of the $300,000 to $1 million it costs to build an app.”

Your Banker Is Always In: Sweden Rolls Out the Robots

Sweden. Land of Robyn, and also robots! Seriously, though, this is so exciting. It is not easy to roll out bots for financial services, but we love that these big players in Swedish banking see the benefits so clearly: for one, it’s a potential cure for customer satisfaction since “Swedish banks have already seen their customer satisfaction scores drop to a 20-year low after shutting branches and pushing people onto online services.” So they’re finally able to fill in those service gaps. Secondly, they see the long term gain of helping their customers become more digitally savvy. Great stuff!