Well, we’ve officially come full circle. The future of technology is being driven by next-generation AOL chat rooms powered by Slack, and next-generation chat bots championed by Facebook. They say “everything old is new again,” and it appears as though that’s indeed the case.
All (half-)joking aside, Facebook on Tuesday made a series of big announcements at its F8 developer conference, and one of the biggest was the hotly anticipated launch of a new bot platform for Facebook Messenger. These machine-powered chat accounts allow companies to interact with Facebook Messenger users without, you know, actually having to interact with Facebook Messenger users. There’s definitely a great deal of potential there, and the first wave of chat bots has already begun to roll out.
MUST SEE: Our first look at the Amazon Kindle’s most radical redesign ever
Yesterday we told you a bit about Facebook’s new bot platform in our roundup of the company’s biggest announcements from F8. But now that the bots have begun to roll out, it’s time to stop reading and start chatting. A site appropriately called BotList has begun to keep track of all the Facebook Messenger bots out there, and the first 40 have now been posted.
Here they are:
- Assist
- M
- Operator
- Uber on Messenger
- Awesome PA
- Sonar
- Text-a-Pro
- GIF Keyboard
- Business on Messenger
- Imoji on Messenger
- Doodle for Messenger
- GIF Quotes for Messenger
- GIFjam for Messenger
- Dubsmash
- Giphy for Messenger
- Legend for Messenger
- Kanvas for Messenger
- Boostr
- Cleo Video Texting
- ClipDis
- Ditty
- Effectify
- Qualcomm EmotionAR
- Emu
- FlipLip Voice Changer
- Fotor
- Noah Camera
- Pyro
- to.be Camera
- UltraText
- Wordeo
- Dropbox on Messenger
- Messenger Platform
- CNN
- Wall Street Journal
- Poncho
- Spring
- KLM
- 1-800-Flowers
- HealthTap
Expect plenty more bots in the future, but that’s more than enough to start with.
How do you chat with them? It’s simple: just open Facebook Messenger and search for any of the names you see above. Tap the bot when it pops up in your results, and you can begin chatting. As you can see in the screenshot below, bots that are active will jump right into the conversation.
Welcome to the future!
