San Fransico: Shopping for your favourite shirt would be as easy as sending a text on Facebook Messenger as social media giant’s latest feature chatbot, unveiled at its annual, two-day F8 developer conference in San Fransico today, would allow users to interact with businesses and get updates from them.
Over the course of the next two days we're expecting to see a range of announcements coming from the social media giant
The tech firm has already made a slew of exciting announcements including "Live" video streaming, virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) phenomenon and more at the event.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage to start the event and unveiled Facebook's grand 10-year plan.
Here are the five major features unveiled by the tech-giant to stay ahead of ever-changing marketing dynamics
Chatbots: It’s a new Messenger Platform tool that lets developers create chat bots for customer service. Facebook showed that with chatbots, interactive software powered by artificial intelligence and with human help, users of its Messenger service can send messages to businesses just like they do to their friends and get things done, Xinhua reported. Facebook Messenger users now can try about a half dozen chatbots on this platform and more are expected to come soon. Facebook also released a set of tools to allow software developers to create chatbots for the Messenger in partnership with businesses.
Also read: 10 Successful Tech Tycoons Who Made It Big Without A College Degree
'Live' video: The social network has been investing heavily into video and its live-streaming product is becoming increasingly important. While new developer tie-ins seem unlikely given the relative youth of the platform, it is possible that Facebook will use F8 to extol the virtues of "Live".
360-degree 3D video camera: Facebook unveiled its own 360-degree stereoscopic 3D video camera. The company calls this new device the Facebook Surround 360 and is built for $30,000. This black circular camera has a disk-shaped spaceship-like design that has 17 evenly spaced lenses. The camera records images from all 17 of those lenses and produces a 360-degree spherical video for viewing both inside virtual reality headsets like the Samsung Gear (stereoscopic 3D) and on ordinary smartphones, tablets, and PCs (monoscopic).
Also read: Soon, you will be able to make payments via Facebook Messenger
Buy Tickets Directly: Facebook users will soon be able to buy tickets directly as the social networking giant is expanding further into e-commerce. The company will connect to ticketing leaders Ticketmaster and Eventbrite, which will offer an option to buy tickets for selected US events listed on the networking site.
Account Kit: Facebook had also announced Account Kit that will allow users to sign-in to apps using their email or phone number, without needing a Facebook account. Once in the app, users will have to enter their phone number or email address and the service will then send a code that just need to be punched in. This initiative has been taken for the developers to ease the on-boarding process – sign-in users and engage them to start using the app.
