Facebook introduces bots for Messenger chatbots for the Messenger Platform. These bots can provide anything from automated subscription content like weather and traffic updates, to customized communications like receipts, shipping notifications, and live automated messages all by interacting directly with the people who want to get them. This time, chatbots are becoming Big Business, almost at once: Every month, over 900 million people around the world communicate with friends, families and over 50 million businesses on Messenger. It’s the second most popular app on iOS, and was the fastest growing app in the US in 2015.Now business can engage with their customer in a personalised, emotional and way and is available 24/7.
The Messenger Send / Receive API will support not only sending and receiving text, but also images and interactive rich bubbles containing multiple calls-to-action. Check out the Messenger Platform (Beta) to find more information but the company is accepting submissions one by one (no acceptance bot involved 
).
On this launch day, Facebook has found several partners for the first demonstration chatbots:
Spring: (shoes and fashion)
Poncho: (entertaining weather forecast)
CNN: (personalised news )
and 1-800—Flowers (the flower ordering service in the US):
The future: Facebook notes that the availability of Wit.ai’s Bot Engine will enable developers to build more complex bots that can interpret intent from natural language, and continuously learn to get better over time.
My Addition: this is REALLY breaking news for the Chatbot industry! The last wave was with MSN Messenger between 2005 and 2010. This is the fourth wave and it seems that this wave is here to stay! The future is clear as well: chatbots (sometimes referred as virtual assistant or a virtual agent) will be the primary contact of every business. Ever small businesses. Chatbots will be very personal, pro-active and at last but not least they will act upon your emotions and show emotions as well. Business chatbots will be as natural as any other friend! I’ve predicted this in my awarded book, published in 2005, on the future of media, marketing and brands and I wrote a lot about it on Chatbots.org and on the brand dialogue pages on my personal website Your Future Is Now!
As you remember, Chatbots.org has been around since 2008. Our chatbot listing is worldwide renowed and our 10K members have created 100K of pages as a community. We have thousands of visitors from all countries in the world every day of the day. And we’re still growing. This announcement by Facebook will fuel this website as well and I probably need to refocus back on this exciting field again. I’m looking forward to the exciting future that has started today!!! Have you found a chatbot that isn’t listed on Chatbots.org? Why don’t you add your chatbot to our listing and get visible!
p.s. did you know Chatbots.org already had a list of Facebook chatbots since about 2007? This is why: In the past, Facebook allowed apps to integrate chatbots in pages but they stopped the support of this future. We’ll update this page with the latest chatbots soon with the bots for Messenger. Keep us posted with your latest additions!
