Facebook introduced two new features in Messenger app to help users communicating better. The features are P2P payment and pollling, that enable you to pay your friend and allow you to ask question and see the most popular answes.
The 'chat assists' features use machine learning to prompt users to launch specific action based on what they say in their Facebook Messenger. Busines Insider gives an example, that machine learning will react to a user's phrase, such as"IOU" or "send me $10 for lunch." Following such phrase, Messenger will prompt user to make a payment via debit card or other payment information.
With this new feature, Facebook encourage its existing users to make payment through its Messenger, thus attracting new users.
"We look at this chat assist function with polls and payments as just another example of offering help to make Messenger users lives easier, " A Facebook representative told Tech Crunch about the new features.
Another feature that was introduce is a group chat polling. This is a new overhaul of the Facebook Polls launched in 2007, which was removed in 2013, as Facebook prefered to use threaded comment instead of polls. Now polling is back as a new feature in Facebook Messengers.
The polling feature allow users to ask a specific question with some possible answers and sending them to everyone in a group chat. People then can vote what their preferences are and see what is the most popular answer.
When Facebook removed its polling feature in 2013 in favor of threaded comments, many users regret the decision. The original polling feature was not free-of-charge, it was priced at minimum $.10 per data point and initial insertion fee. But marketers found the feature very useful, because as an advertising product it was designed to generate revenue
The new features in Facebook Messenger are only available in the U.S., and available for both Android and iOS users. But Facebook may roll out the features to other countries as well.
