Bot Invasion! Prepare for chatbots on Facebook Messenger, too

Who needs to chat with humans when we can do all of our chatting with bots. I'm Bridget Carey, this is your CNet update. [BLANK_AUDIO] I don't mean to cause a panic, but I need to alert you that the chatbot invasion has begun. And Facebook is just the latest company said to be incorporating bots into its messaging services. No, get out of here, I'm not talking about those bots. Let's talk about chatbots. Bots are software programs that will do your bidding to book appointments or fetch answers from different services. So you don't have to open up a different app for every task. You can think of it like a personal assistant inside a text chat window. On Tuesday Facebook will announce that it's putting bots inside of the messenger chat. Service. And that's according to a report from tech crunch. The tech site say its Facebook is giving some developers an early look at the tools to build live chat box for business clients. So you could just have a chat with a brand bot when you need Something instead of calling a 1-800 number. These chat bots could pull up info about your online order or even make a restaurant reservation. Facebook has tinkered with the concept recently. Right now you can book an Uber car inside of messenger while chatting with a friend. And if you fly with airline KLM, you can look up your flight information inside Messenger. The social network is also testing artificial intelligence with a personal assistant called M which is similar in concept to Apple's Siri or Microsoft's Cortana. In fact, that's the big topic at Microsoft's developers conference in March. Microsoft Push programmers to make bots to work inside Skype, and with the Cortona personal assistant, one example was a bot that booked you a hotel room and another ordered from Domino's and doesn't have to all be with text chat, Skype can also have bots in video form. So basically Microsoft is building a Max Headroom. Other competing chat apps starting embracing bots. The app Line, which is popular in Asia, is allowing programmers to test bots on its messaging service; and the app Kick launched a bot store just the other day. These chat bots for businesses are added to your contacts. Sometimes it's the same way you would add a friend but instead of a friendship its for news and customer service. Facebook wants businesses to do more with messenger but it's not all about Box. Messenger also launched user names for businesses as well as scannable codes. So a customer could use a phone to scan a code and quickly jump to a business page. Get ready to hear more about bots on Tuesday at Facebook's F8 developer's conference. You can follow CNet's live coverage of the keynotes starting at 10 AM Pacific, 1 PM Eastern. That's all for this tech news round up From our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey. [MUSIC]