Out of nowhere, bots are suddenly all the rage. Last week at Build 2016, we saw Microsoft release a bunch of bot-building tools for developers. Now, Facebook is throwing its hat into the bot battle with the beta launch of Bot Engine, a new tool that uses machine learning to make chatbots more intelligent.

Bot Engine, which can be used alongside Facebook’s new Send/Receive API for building Messenger bots, was developed by Facebook Messenger’s Wit.ai team.

“In the last six months we’ve learned a lot, and notably we needed to build a variety of small vertical bots to help resolve intent for people,” said David Marcus, Facebook’s vice president of messaging.

Like every cool new technology these days, Bot Engine is relies upon machine learning. In other words, developers who wish to use it can feed it masses of information in order to “teach” the bots they create what to say in certain situations. By doing so, it will “continuously learn to get better over time,” Marcus wrote.

Bot Engine is ideally suited to work with Facebook Messenger, but can also be used with other popular platforms like Slack.

The potential here is absolutely massive, as my colleague Robert Hof noted in his writeup of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s keynote yesterday.

“With the new Messenger Platform, bots will be able to provide weather and traffic updates, shipping notifications, and shopping receipts via a conversational interface. A Messenger Send/Receive API, or application programming interface, will let businesses send and receive not only text messages, but images and interactive “rich bubbles” that include calls to action such as a “message me” button.”

The other aspect is that developers can improve their bots as time passes, to a point where they will eventually sound no different from humans.

Facebook’s Bot Engine service went live yesterday, and already it looks a lot more powerful than Microsoft’s recently released tool. With these kinds of tools now free to all developers, expect to see a brand new space for bot-related startups opening up as people start to build increasingly more sophisticated and intelligent chatbots for all kinds of different purposes.

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