Facebook Inc. has launched Messenger Platform 2.1, which includes a slew of new features that will make it easier for businesses and developers to reach new and existing customers.

With more than 1.2 billion people using Facebook Messenger each month, the company is constantly looking at new ways to encourage businesses to use the platform and provide future revenue opportunities.

During its second-quarter earnings call Wednesday, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg spoke about getting advertising onto its messaging platforms, including WhatsApp, a move that he said the company would “make sure we get this right” before rolling out many ads. Facebook started its monetization of Messenger earlier this month with the roll out of global advertising on the messaging service’s home tab.

Facebook introduced its Messenger Platform 2.0 at the company’s F8 developers conference in April, which emphasized bot discovery with the new Discover Tab, Chat Extensions and M Suggestions.

As part of Messenger Platform 2.1, Facebook has introduced built-in natural language processing, a payments software development kit, new Call-to-Action buttons and a global beta test of a handover protocol that makes it easier to switch between automated bots and humans.

Built-in natural-language processing

With built-in NLP enabled it will be able to detect common phrases from users’ texts before it gets passed to the bot. The first version of the built-in NLP will be able to detect phrases like hello, bye, thanks, date & time, location, amount of money, phone number, email and a URL. The bot will then reply with an automatic response.

“We have more and more natural language interactions inside of messenger and we want to help third party developers, existing enterprise and customer support, and service centers automate a lot of those interactions, and a big, big requirement to automation is understanding what people are asking,” David Marcus, head of Facebook Messenger told reporters Wednesday. With this in mind, Marcus said they introduced built-in NLP that will “enable automation at scale.”

While developers have always had access to NLP capabilities from Wit.ai, which Facebook acquired in early 2015, the NLP features in Messenger Platform 2.1 are now built in. In the company’s own blog post released today, Wit.ai announced that it would discontinue its Bot Engine for NLP, which launched in early 2016.

Handover protocol

Messenger Platform 2.1 also includes what the company is calling “handover protocol,” which will allow businesses and developers to allow multiple service providers within their Messenger bot and move seamlessly between bot and human.

The handover protocol will allow customers to get readily available information from the automated bot, including answers to frequently asked questions, customer onboarding process, and the like. Then when the customer needs more personalized support or additional information, a live agent can be bought in.

Handover protocol is available worldwide as an open beta.

SDK for payments in Messenger webview

Payments in Messenger has also received an upgrade with a new SDK that will streamline the Messenger webview payment process. When customers want to buy an item via Messenger they can use the new one step process through Messenger webview.

The SDK forms part of Payments on Messenger, which is currently still in beta and only available in the U.S.

New Facebook Page buttons for Messenger

Facebook is adding to its existing Call-to-Action button of “Send Message” with five new, descriptive CTA buttons that businesses and developers can add to their Page to drive people to Messenger and start a conversation. The new CTA buttons include Shop Now, Get Support, Get Updates, Play Now and Get Started.

Extensions SDK gets desktop support

To “create a consistent experience across devices,” according to Facebook’s blog post, the company is adding desktop support for Extensions SDK. Features that were previously only available on mobile, like user ID and sharing, will now also be accessible on desktop.

Additional Messenger 2.1 Platform features

Global Pages can now take advantage of Chat Extensions, which were introduced in Platform 2.0, to allow for a collaborative experience across the globe and allows multiple people to chat with the same business simultaneously. Previously businesses that used Global Pages where users in the thread were in different regions were unable to use Chat Extensions.

Thanks to policy enforcement notifications, developers will now receive notifications if their bot has been blocked for some reason or there are any policy issues.

Finally, Messenger Platform 2.1 includes an update to customer matching API. Currently available to select U.S. businesses, partners will be able to see if there is a match to a phone number or name via the API, prior to sending a message.  

Image: Anthony Quintano; Flickr