How to set up and use Facebook Messenger bots

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Years after Mark Zuckerberg announced the creation of Facebook Messenger bots, many Facebook users and businesses still don’t understand how useful Messenger bots can be. There are only about 500,000 Facebook Messenger bots in active use today.

With so many of you yet to discover the usefulness of Facebook Messenger bots, here is a simple introduction and guide on how to set up and use Facebook Messenger bots.

What is a Facebook Messenger bot?

A Facebook Messenger bot is software designed to use AI (artificial intelligence) to communicate with others. Simply put, a bot is automated software designed to perform automated tasks.

These robots understand what is being asked of them and are able to formulate a human-like response. This is why Facebook bots are on the right track to completely revolutionize marketing, customer service, and sales. Automation is the way of the future.

How to configure Facebook Messenger bots

There are several ways to configure Facebook Messenger bots, depending on how comfortable you are with coding. For those who don’t know how to code, here is an easy way to set up bots without coding through Chatfuel.

You can subscribe to Chatfuel for free, or you can choose one of the three premium subscriptions offered by Chatfuel. You can easily create Facebook chatbots with the free subscription, so you don’t have to worry about monthly payments.

On the Chatfuel home page, click the button Try for free button to start. You then need to log into your Facebook account and authorize Chatfuel to access your public profile and email.

You need to link your Facebook account to your Chatfuel account.

Customize your chat bot

After registering and linking your account, you can start customizing your Messenger bot. The first thing you need to configure is the welcome message that anyone who comes across your Messenger bot will be able to see.

You can do this by clicking Settings> Messaging On your Facebook page. Adjust Display a Messenger greeting To Yes, Click on Switch, then type your welcome message in the box. After that just click to safeguard.

Sometimes users might ask the Messenger bot for something that the AI â€‹â€‹won’t be able to respond to. If this happens, you should set up a default response that will tell them what to do next (contact support, reward their question, etc.).

The implementation of certain AI rules is also essential. You can do this by clicking on Configure AI> Add AI rule in the Chatfuel dashboard. Chatfuel allows you to configure as many keywords as you want.

Add message button

The Messenger button won’t magically appear on your Facebook page, keep that in mind.

If you want to add it to your Facebook page, you must first open your Facebook page and click on Add button. A window will open where you can select Contact you and Send the message. To select Messenger when asked where the button should send people.

2 more ways to set up Facebook chat bots

1. Dialogue flow

Dialogflow (free) is a service owned by Google. It is a natural language understanding platform that allows you to design and integrate a conversational interface into web apps, mobile apps, bots, interactive voice response systems, devices, and devices. related uses.

Advantages:

Easy integration of NLP (Natural Language Processing).
It contains many predefined agents.
You can connect to platforms other than Facebook, such as Twitter, Telegram, Slack, etc.
It recognizes more than 15 languages.
It’s free.

The inconvenients:

It’s not very customizable. Building a customizable bot means you have to implement code flow.
It is not very achievable. It can be quite difficult to figure out how to implement it on different platforms.

2. Wit.ai

Owned by Facebook, Wit.ai (free) works quite similar to Dialogflow. It processes human speech patterns and filters payload data. Wit.ai provides a user interface to help you create intents, agents, and entities.

Advantages:

It easily integrates NLP.
It offers a quick start tutorial which is quite handy.
You can integrate it with platforms other than Facebook like Twitter, Slack, Telegram, etc.
It’s totally free.
It is adaptable because you can build your bot with Python, Node.js, or Ruby.

The inconvenients:

It’s not that fast because there is a learning curve for Wit.ai.
It’s not that visual, which means there’s no visual development, so you need to be comfortable with the code.

Easily create your own Facebook Messenger bot

You don’t need to know any coding to create a Facebook Messenger bot. Chatfuel is a platform that will do most of the work for you, but it’s also not the only help available. If you’re a bit into coding, you have a few options from Google and Facebook to help you create custom chatbots.

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About the Author

Logan Taker
(24 articles published)

Logan tried a lot of things before falling in love with writing in 2011. MakeUseOf gives him the opportunity to share his knowledge and produce useful, factual articles on productivity.