Facebook Testing Chat Assist for Messenger; Adds New Group Chat Polls Feature
Facebook is testing a new feature on its Messenger app that’ll use machine learning to prompt us to pay back our friends. It depends on a new service called "chat assist" that identifies certain words and the activities they reference when they come up in conversation. If we type "IOU" into Messenger, for instance, chat assist will drop a link asking if we want to pay whatever amount we owe. Facebook says the service is automated and optional.
Chat Assists follows the current launch of Facebook Messenger's online payment system. Users will be able to pay the amount they owe directly through Messenger. The payment service was introduced so that business could sell their products and services directly to customers through Messenger.
In the meantime, Facebook Messenger will get group chat polls. The feature only works for group chats and works like any other poll. We can start a poll by tapping the Polls icon in the composer. We can then type a question like 'where to eat' and give options for our group to vote on. It's a fresh, hassle-free way to know what people want. Currently, the feature is only available in the US for Android and iOS users.
One of the profits of using a messaging app is the suitability of group conversations. But extended group chats can get overly complex. This is where polling comes into play: Facebook explains that “it’s often hard to get groups of people to make decisions and plans, from deciding what movie to go watch, what restaurants to eat at, which day to meet up for coffee, where to go on the next family vacation, and much more.”
Polls allow us write a question and some possible answers, send them to everybody in a group chat, and then see what’s most popular so we can make plans together.