Facebook unveils 'Bot Platform' for Messenger at F8 developer conference

Chatbots could totally replace the usual means of communicating with companies online

Users flagged the Republican nominee's statements as hate speech to Facebook (Getty)

After weeks of speculation, Facebook has finally launched its 'Bot Platform' for Messenger, which will bring an enormous range of new services to the popular app.

Unveiled by Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the company's F8 developer conference, the platform will provide customers with a completely new way to communicate with businesses.

Rather than calling someone up, filling out contact forms or going through hundreds of check-boxes, Facebook users will simply be able to message a company, interacting with it via an artificially intelligent chat robot.

An example of the software given at the conference showed a customer ordering a bunch of flowers from a florist - rather than going through their website to find the right bouquet, they simply messaged the company's bot on Facebook Messenger, using conversational language to tell it what they wanted and where the bouquet should be delivered.

These bots could also be used to order food, book cinema tickets and get taxis - basically, if there's a service that exists on the web, Facebook wants to replace it with a bot.

If users embrace the technology (and it's still unclear whether they will), it could completely change the face of the web. Some experts have compared the platform's potential impact to Apple's App Store, which changed mobile technology forever when it was launched in 2008.

Chatbots are not a new technology, but Facebook's artificial intelligence know-how and its sheer size could bring them to a much wider audience.

More details on how the platform will work will be revealed to developers over the course of the conference, which ends on 13 April. It's only in the beta stage for the time being, but the bots are coming, potentially sooner rather than later.