The thing is, within the next 5 years, most of the professions we know will actually die, including some of the intellectual ones. And it’s all due to the development of artificial intelligence.
AI is already here
People think of AI as something distant, something far in the future. You might think that it’s quite complex stuff and you need to develop something like a neural network to bring it into being. The fact is, you don’t need to deal with this anymore because big companies have already done it. Facebook, IBM, Google and others have been working on AI for around a decade now, and, as a result, they’ve come up with libraries. These are kind of very simple boxes that have APIs and you just need to connect your application through an API to this black box and you’ve got AI – you’ve got natural language processing, you’ve got computer vision, object recognition etc.
So I was like, all our clients deserve to have this top-notch information put in a very simple form. That’s why I wanted to share some interesting information about Facebook messenger platform. I’ve done some research recently and here’s what I found out.
[announce]
In April 2016, Mark Zuckerberg announced the chat bot platform at Facebook F8 event, which is an event for developers. And it’s going to revolutionize how we interact with businesses because you don’t need to install applications anymore to talk to businesses, now you can chat with a business through the instant messenger.
So how does a chat bot platform work?
There is a user and he chats through the messenger which we all already know. Whichever message a user sends, it gets to your server, and your server communicates with a user through the messenger. It is, of course, associated with a Facebook page of yours. There are some legal limitations, that’s why your business has to be registered in the USA at the moment but I foresee it expanding across the globe really fast. And then Facebook came up with their own natural language processing AI which they call wit.ai. This is a platform where you can teach your bot to recognize your user’s intentions. So your user may say something like: ‘I want to buy this, for this price, at this place’. So you say it as a natural language and it’s sent to your application server, in its turn, it utilizes wit.ai which transforms this natural language request into a very structured JSON format request which says here is the intent so intent is ‘buy’, object is ‘sneakers Nike, model this and that’ and then you have more parameters. So your server has a very clear cart request to process and ship the goods to your user. As simple as that.
And a really good developer can integrate all this communication in a couple of days. It’s just that simple. There are specifications on how your server has to comply with the Facebook messenger, there is an API format described, there are some rules of what you can and cannot do through the messenger but, basically, that’s it – 2 APIs and a couple of rules, you register it through the Facebook platform, it is approved, and you’re all set up.
You’re not sure you can do it? Contact us and you’ll see how easy it can be!
