Chapter 5. Designing a Facebook Messenger Chatbot
Chatbots and voicebots both fall into the conversational UI category. In the previous chapter, we talked about designing and building voice user experience and interface. Next, we will go back to the design of textual bots, focusing on the Facebook (FB) Messenger platform. With the promise of enabling a "connection to 900 million people on the Messenger platform" and with the goal to "take over sales and customer service functions," FB has the target of revolutionizing the world of chatbots. Indeed, FB revealed at the F8 2018 conference that its platform runs 300,000 bots (https://venturebeat.com/2018/05/01/facebook-messenger-passes-300000-bots/), with more than 8 billion messages sent each day! This is four times more than in 2017.
Around 200,000 developers have used the FB Messenger platform to enable their bots, and that number continues to grow. FB puts a lot of emphasis on the Messenger...