Facebook announced on Wednesday, April 20, that its Messenger apps on Android and iOS will start supporting group calling features.
Facebook's head of Messenger made the announcement on Facebook, specifying that the new feature will come to Messenger's Andorid and iOS apps and once the feature is live a phone icon will appear in the top right corner of group conversations.
According to Mashable, users in a call would be able to see who in the group is participating in the call. Currently the calls are limited to 50 participants per call. This number is high enough so the new feature would be able to accommodate most of a user's Messenger threads.
Slack, Microsoft's Skype and Google Hangouts support all free group calling, so this update will also make Facebook Messenger more competitive. Until now Facebook Messenger hasn't supported group calling even if voice calls were implemented for years already.
According to Bussiness2Community, at its F8 developer conference Facebook also made the announcement of a new API for its Messenger service that will allow companies to interact with customers via bots. The implementation of bots opens the way for a 100 percent automated and scalable "conversational commerce".
Bots can provide to customers anything from customized communications like live automated messages, receipts and shipping notifications, to automated subscription content like traffic and weather updates. Chat bots can interact directly with customers who are interested to have access to certain information.
According to eMarketer, experts estimate that the rate of user penetration of the messaging app will exceed 68 percent by 2019. Companies will be able to reach smartphone owners via a messaging app even if they will not download the app.
One of the Facebook's launch partners is the ecommerce shopping destination Spring. Spring co-founder Alan Tisch explained in an interview for the New York Times about the reasons why his company signed up.
According to Mr. Tisch, much of the commerce is based on conversations already, but conversing with a chat bot can make the shopping experience to feel like magical. However, not all customers might find bots worthy of their time and not all companies might consider the bots useful for their business. Only time can tell if chat bots will become a common occurrence in ecommerce.
