Hello bots, goodbye apps? Facebook cooks up chatbots, video drones, social VR
Tech Industry
Facebook wants to destroy the need for apps, one bot at a time.
I'm Bridget Carey, this is your C Net update.
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Soon you won't just be chatting with your friends on Facebook messenger.
You'll also be chatting bots built by companies.
At Facebook's essay developers conference Mark Zuckerberg revealed that bots are coming to messenger.
One such bot could be for news.
CNN has one that sends you a list of Stories of the day, and you can ask it to pull up stories on a certain topic.
You can also go shopping in side Messenger.
1-800-FLOWERS built a chat bot that lets you order flowers for delivery, and it just pulls all data about you from your account and asks you You a few questions about the order along the way.
Facebook is not the first to jump on this chatbot trend.
Other messaging apps, including Skype have been rolling out similar tools.
The app Telegram added bots a year ago, with a few new tools just announced.
A bot from YouTube can help you find and share YouTube videos.
Or add Foursquare to your chat and it'll pull up addresses of places nearby.
So you can expect similar Chatbot tools will come to Facebook.
Zuckerberg also wants to see Facebook live video broadcasts grow.
Live video will be a prominent tab on the app to see not only what your friends are doing, but to check out what other people around the world are up to.
And programmers can incorporate Facebook Live into other apps, such as being able to stream video right from a drone camera, as Zuckerberg demonstrated onstage.
That wasn't the only drone discussed.
Zuckerberg talked more about the drone airplane at the company's building to get more people connected online.
This V-shaped plane has a wing Span of a Boeing 737.
It weighs less than a small car.
It can fly twice as high as normal commercial flights, and with solar panels it can stay up for two months at a time beaming Internet access down below to Earth.
In a few months Facebook will also launch its First satellite into space to provide free Internet to 14 countries in Africa.
VIrtual reality is obviously a major focus for Zuckerberg as Facebook owns Oculus and Zuckerberg told the audience that it was just a matter of time before virtual and augmented reality Headgear will be shrunk into a pair of normal glasses.
He said Facebook is exploring new ways to be social in virtual reality.
And to encourage the creation of more virtual reality and 3D video, Facebook showed off a 360 degree camera.
It Designed with 17 lenses.
But it won't be so bad on social network.
Face at once developers to take the design and created themselves.
That's all for these technic's round up.
You can have the cnet.com for more.
From our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey.
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