Will help users find chatbots and nearly businesses
“We are excited to announce that starting today we will gradually be rolling out the Discover tab in India, a new feature in Messenger that makes it easy and simple for people to find and browse bots and business pages,” Facebook said in a statement.
Discover was originally unveiled by Facebook at this year’s F8 developer conference, but the ability to browse and find bots and businesses was added in June. The feature was limited to US initially, but it seems Facebook is expanding it to more markets. I tried looking for information on which markets Discover is available at this point, but couldn’t find anything. All support pages just mention about the availability in the US.
How does the Discover work?
At the lower right-hand corner of the Messenger app, there is a small icon, which takes you to the Discover tab. Here, you can find the recently used bots, featured bots/ businesses, and popular bots/ businesses. You will also be able to browse by category or search by name. If you find a bot or businesses you want to talk to, just tap on their name and you are good to go. In some cases you might have to allow Facebook to share your public information with a bot in order to use it effectively. The Discover tab also mentions the amount of time that bot will take to reply to you.
For a few months earlier this year, there was a period when every big tech company seemed to believe that chatbots are the next big thing. But that excitement has subsided now. It seems with this expansion of Discover outside US, Facebook is making a last attempt to get people to start using bots.
