Facebook Bot Messenger

With over 900 million active users per month, Facebook Messenger is one off the most popular mobile application. As announced by Facebook a few month ago, it is now possible for developers to connect with people who use Messenger with the bots for the Messenger Platform.

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.

We wanted to experiment and use this new service to provide a simple bot experience that can showcase our projects and provide information on our Facebook Page.

GIF of a conversation between a bot and human.

The main purpose of Ned, our bot is to engage a conversation. Ned should help the user to navigate through our variety of projects and provide useful information about us.
For this experiment we wanted to use a simple approach. In all this conversation the user has a simple way to interact with Ned : using buttons. Ned communicate in a way that encourages a response. We use buttons to add structure to our messages and call out specific actions people can take.

How it works

As for all of our projects, we wanted a technological and creative approach for the conception of Ned. Even if this bot is in its simple form, it’s important for us to use the cutting edge technologies to improve the user experience.
We use a serverless approach to provide a fast and scalable bot solution. Amazon provide the perfects tool for that. Facebook interact with our bot with the API Gateway. On each call, the message is processed by a lambda function which use our DynamoDB data to provide the perfect answer for the user.

We have already do some experiment using a natural dialog API. A bot with natural dialog capacity can provide a richer experience for the end-user. The dialog capacity enables a bot to use natural language to automatically answer to users questions, cross-sell and up-sell, walk users through processes or applications, or even hand-hold users through difficult tasks.

You can discuss with Ned on our Facebook Page (sorry he speaks French, currently learning other languages). The bot for Facebook Messenger open a new and interesting way to provide content and dialog with user. If you want more information about the bot for Facebook Messenger, just contact us :)

We hope you enjoyed the reading.