Facebook F8: Messenger to get new robot powers and virtual reality to roll out at company’s developer conference

Chat bots are expected to be the headline feature of Facebook’s event, which will also see announcements about live video and virtual reality

It will no longer route sales through Ireland for its largest advertisers. (Getty Images)

Facebook is about to launch a huge new bot platform that could change the future of the internet forever.

The company is unveiling a platform of chat bots that it hopes can become the future of customer service and information. That brings it into line with Microsoft’s Skype and other apps like Kik in moving its focuses onto chatbots that are meant to help people out.

The new bots will sit within the Messenger app, which users traditionally use to chat to friends — and, as of last year, human representatives for businesses. But the site is making some of those representatives into robots, allowing companies to have their customers chat with artificially intelligent versions of those helpers.

Facebook, Telegram and Skype users of the future will be able to chat with bots and tell them to do a whole host of different tasks. By being built to recognise specific phrases, they’ll be able to carry out the same work as a customer service assistant: if a user tells the bot to pay their friend £30, for instance, then the robot will be able to recognise the different parts of that sentence and send the money through their bank, no humans needed.

Some companies have already signed up or the plan, including clothes retailer Zulily and Uber.

Facebook has already shown the power of some of those with its virtual assistant, known as M. That tool is built into messenger and will respond to people’s requests using a combination of artificial intelligence and humans.

But that power also seems to be limited. The app hasn’t rolled out much further than San Francisco, yet, and more developed features appear still to be handled by humans.

Facebook’s announcement at F8 follows similar ones from Microsoft. Its CEO, Satya Nadella, said that “bots are the new apps” and rolled out new programming tools for developers.

Microsoft’s first chat bot that broke into the mainstream was Tay, which was supposed to emulate the style of US millennial. But it was shut down almost immediately after malicious Twitter users made it repeat racist and even apparently genocidal statements.

Facebook’s bots aren’t expected to be as public — built into the private Messenger feed rather than the public discussion board of Twitter.