Facebook is enlisting more than two dozen companies to help it turn its Messenger app into a hub for shopping, news and entertainment.
At its annual F8 conference in San Francisco, Facebook showed developers how chatbots could be used to field customer-service questions, give weather updates and help people to order goods, without needing a real person on the other end of the conversation.
There are more than 25 partners using the chatbots initially, including delivery companies and media outfits such as The Wall Street Journal and CNN.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has reiterated how Facebook will focus Messenger and that messaging apps will be central to the company over the next five years.
Last year, Facebook began testing ways for businesses to reach users over the chat app. Chatbots could help expand the number of businesses that can interact with Messenger’s 900 million users
