Gadgetory

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 dear viewers I don't mean to cause a panic but I need to alert you that the choppa inversion has begun and Facebook is just the latest company said to be incorporating BOTS into its messaging services and no get out of here I'm not talking about those BOTS talk about chat bots 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 TechCrunch the tech site says Facebook is giving some developers an early look at the tools to build live chat BOTS for business clients so you could just have a chat with a brand spot 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 BOTS were the big topic at Microsoft's Developers Conference in March Microsoft pushed programmers to make BOTS to work inside Skype and with the Cortana personal assistant one example was the bot that booked you a hotel room and another ordered pizza from dominos and it doesn't have to be all with text chat Skype can also have BOTS in video form so basically Microsoft is building a Max Headroom other competing chat apps started 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 the same way you would add a friend but instead of friendship it's for news and customer service facebook wants businesses to do more with messenger but it's not all about BOTS 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 Developers Conference you can follow CNET's live coverage of the keynotes starting at 10 a.m. Pacific 1:00 p.m. Eastern that's all for this tech news roundup from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey