SAN JOSE — When Facebook Messenger’s head of product Stan Chudnovsky thinks about building new features for the tech firm’s messaging app, the competition from WeChat, Line and other similar services isn’t part of the equation.
Instead, he focuses on understanding what people want to do in the app.
“The competition question will sort of answer itself, and the strategy is based on that,” he said in an interview Tuesday at Facebook’s developer conference in San Jose.
On Tuesday, Facebook Messenger released new features aimed at making it easier for its 1.2 billion users to find businesses and bots, help groups chat with a business at the same time and order food with a virtual assistant.
The messaging app is adding a new tab so users can discover the best businesses and bots on the platform. Users can also add a bot to a group message thread, allowing them to share music from Spotify, get sport game updates or book a reservation at a restaurant. Partnering with delivery.com, Facebook Messenger users can now order food from restaurants within the messaging app.
About 20 million businesses are active on Messenger, and Facebook is hoping that number continues to grow. Still, interacting with bots isn’t perfect, and the way a sentence is phrased can confuse the computer programs, which mimic human conversation.
“Last year was all about creating the foundation, learning a lot and iterating. This year is the year of scale,” David Marcus, who heads messaging products for Facebook, said during a speech at the conference.
From adding mobile payments to games and Snapchat-like features, Facebook Messenger continues to expand what people can do within the app. The move could also help Facebook attract more ad dollars from businesses interested in attracting new customers.
Facebook already offers an ad product that includes a button that users can click on to send a message to a business.
“You want to meet the customers where the customer is, and that’s where we are in messaging apps. For businesses, it’s a very logical way to engage in that way, and they’re taking very significant strides in making bots available,” said IDC analyst John Jackson.
On Facebook, businesses know who their customers are, and they have a history of their interaction with a customer.
Chudnovsky believes Messenger will stay relevant as it harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to personalize what it thinks users want to do.
“Certain things about humans are never going to change,” he said. “Our need to talk to each other in small groups and our need to have one-on-one conversations have stayed constant.”