Yahuui Blog: Software : Friends with benefits: Facebook wants you to talk with businesses

Thursday, April 7, 2016

Software : Friends with benefits: Facebook wants you to talk with businesses

Friends with benefits: Facebook wants you to talk with businesses

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Facebook is planning on carving out a fresh revenue stream via its Messenger app, with the introduction of an option to chat with businesses directly from within the service.

Business Insider (BI) spotted the move, with Facebook adding a section for 'Suggested Businesses' underneath the search bar where you can hunt out people and groups.

Messenger suggests some 20 companies that you might wish to talk with, including the likes of Lyft and Chase, although as BI notes, a lot of the businesses presented seem rather obscure right now (including the likes of small town US newspapers).

Obviously this is a feature which Facebook is still working on, and indeed this may just be an experimental rollout of the system to a small number of users which happened to include the reporter's account, with the social network testing the waters.

That idea is further reinforced by the fact that the companies highlighted for chat don't necessarily support chat features – when BI tried to chat with Lyft, the reply received simply indicated that the company didn't support chat.

Business boost

Of course all this will change in the future when the feature is fully rolled out (which it presumably will be), and it'll be extra cash for Facebook as doubtless the idea will be to charge organisations to be highlighted for chat.

Facebook is thinking more and more about businesses these days, and of course has Facebook at Work on the boil – the service hasn't officially launched yet, but should do very soon (it's already being tested quite widely).

Again, that will have a monetisation angle, with companies being charged for Facebook at Work premium services such as analytics and tech support.

For the employee, the service will be broadly the same as everyday Facebook, but with bolstered security – and of course you can forget about playing games like Candy Crush.

Forget credit cards, Facebook Messenger might be the new way to pay

Microsoft's new subservient Skype bots fetch information in seconds

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You may have noticed Microsoft making a big song and dance about AI bots at its Build conference last week. The company has now introduced a few of them to Skype, with two further offerings now being brought to the messaging service.

So what do the new Skype bots, which are called Murphy and Summarize, actually do? Murphy (based on Redmond's Project Murphy) is designed to respond to 'what if' questions and is powered by Microsoft Cognitive Services. It draws from knowledge services including Bing, and attempts to respond to these queries as relevantly as possible.

The twist is the answer will come in the form of one or several images, if the right question is asked, and the idea is that Murphy will become smarter as more people use the bot (as with all machine learning projects).

Summary execution

Summarize, on the other hand, is of more practical use and pretty much does what it says on the tin: you chuck the link for a web page at the bot, and it summarises the page, condensing the text down to three paragraphs to make it more easily digestible.

That could be pretty handy for those in a rush.

As we saw last week, Redmond has big plans for bots which are designed to help run our lives more smoothly, with the company keen to point out that these AI entities will be built with trustworthiness and respectfulness firmly in mind.

And hopefully they'll be better guarded against the prospect of their user base attempting to warp them, as recently happened with the denizens of Twitter and Microsoft's hapless Tay bot.

Via: WinBeta