Meet Asia’s first Facebook news bot

One of the biggest features announced at Facebook’s F8 conference this year was support for AI chatbots. The Zuck outlined a pretty solid vision of a future that prominently features intelligent chat bots designed to meet your everyday needs and requests (because what could possibly go wrong?). With this, Facebook joined Microsoft’s push to popularize consumer-facing artificial intelligence, and it seems like Google is not keen on missing out either.

The most obvious use cases for chatbots are customer service and online shopping, but an online publisher stands to get plenty out of bots too – Zuckerberg said as much when his chatbot demo at F8 included a newsbot from CNN. I thought I’d share some reasons why Tech in Asia decided to create a news delivery bot of our own, which we worked with KeyReply for, and how chatbots benefit both publishers and users. To try our bot, click on this link, or use your Messenger mobile app to scan our Messenger Code below.

Open Messenger app > go to Me > tap on your own profile picture > select Scan Code > hold phone up to this image!

Hello from the other side

As an online publisher, our chief metrics are pageviews and monthly active users. We’re always on the lookout for new avenues to deliver content to more readers – think Buzzfeed’s massive online empire.

With the internet dragging the human attention span down to alarmingly low levels, publishers are always looking for quicker ways to deliver content. Tech in Asia’s already seen some pretty positive changes in readership after introducing Facebook’s Instant Articles, which loads our content at a speed that is frankly as terrifying as it is terrific.

Instead of having to depend on Facebook’s ever-changing news feed algorithms to serve your content, chatbots establish a direct line between publisher and reader. Whether by automatically serving you a daily digest of top stories, or allowing you to quickly search up the latest news in this sector or that country, the publication is now within much closer reach of the user.

As a user, it helps you keep a regular habit of staying updated with the latest happenings, especially if you haven’t had a chance to glance through Facebook all day (but who are we kidding ey?).

Tell me what you want, what you really really want

Each publisher has a unique voice that attracted its reader base in the first place, but it’s 2016, and publishers want to find more success by keeping a close eye on what their readers like or prefer. Even the mindless viral chasers whom we love to hate gain clicks and visits by reacting quickly to popular content and hot trends, allowing them to position themselves as prime advertising spaces.

In bringing news to readers and reacting intelligently to what readers want, your news bot, and in fact any application of chatbots that apply natural language processing, is engaging in potentially hundreds of conversations with your everyday users that you personally can’t do.

How these users talk to the bot, what they ask for, and the points at which the bot gets stumped, all make for priceless data on what your users want, and what they’re looking to consume more of. Whether tweaking the code to successfully respond to more of your readers’ common questions, or monitoring keywords and search terms to better pick out trends and story opportunities that resonate more closely with them, bots are a huge chance for companies to understand their users at scale.

Ticket to the moon

Which brings us to this next point. Chatbots are the first of many steps we’re about to take in the way of artificial intelligence. As we gather more data, engage in more experiments, and develop more sophisticated actions for bots, the possibilities seem endless. A close relative and perhaps older brother of AI-powered chatbots are personalization algorithms, made possible by machine learning. Our engineering and product teams are working hard to bring that experience to Tech in Asia, and we look forward to the day where each of you will be able to enjoy a personalized feed, reading stories you truly enjoy. This chatbot makes a great companion to that experience on Facebook, with more of its own unique features in the works.

It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, and we’re feelin’ good!

Tell me what you want from me

Here are some keywords that will trigger actions with our bot:

• Menu – calls up the main menu
• Help – calls up a list of commands
• Enquire/inquire – leave the page admins a message. We’ll get back to you!
• Subscription – view and edit subscriptions
• Biggest story or popular or hottest or trending – TIA’s Top Stories
• Search or stories about or news about + keyword – search for articles relating to keyword(s)
• Next – read the next chunk of the article
• Stop or enough or skip – stop reading the article in Messenger
• Back – calls up the last search results

Have fun using the bot, and be sure to let us know what you think about chatbot technology, or even our bot, in the comments below!