Facebook Messenger Bots Will Soon Have Multiple Personas
A plugin was released to integrate customer chat with WordPress sites
Facebook Messenger bots will soon begin expressing themselves through multiple personalities, but it’s not a sign of disorder—just one of the updates to Messenger Platform that were announced Friday.
Developers of Messenger bots now have access to the new Persona API (application-programming interface), in open beta, which enables them to add multiple personals to their bots for different use cases.
Only one persona may be used by a Messenger bot at one time, and the personas’ icons and names are fully customizable.
Facebook also responded to requests to make it easier to integrate its customer chat plugin into WordPress sites, making an official plugin available via WordPress.org.
Messenger bots that used message tags outside of the limitation of one message per 24 hours had previously been limited to generic templates, and that restriction has now been lifted.
Product marketing manager David Cohen (no relation) said in a blog post, “We hope this opens up new possibilities for how you send non-promotional messages via tags. Please note that all messages must continue to adhere to the specific use cases allowed for each tag and follow all relevant Messenger Platform policies.”
Finally, Facebook reminded developers that it changed the permission to send non-promotional content as subscription messages from application-level to page-level back in February, and bots that were granted permission at the app level must be approved at the page level by Dec. 31 to continue sending such messages outside of the limitation of one message per 24 hours.
