Yahoo launches Facebook Messenger bots
Yahoo announced yesterday that it launched four bots for Facebook Messenger that users of the messaging application can interact with.
The bots, exclusively available for Android and iOS versions of Facebook Messenger, bring finance, news, weather and, ehm, monkeys, to Facebook Messenger.
The first three bots, bring Yahoo Finance, Yahoo News and Yahoo Weather to Facebook Messenger. They pretty much work as you expect them to work.
Message them to get started, for instance about today's market, what's trending, or the weather in New York.
You get an answer right away from the bot, and may also get additional links to information or options.
Yahoo Facebook Messenger bots
The finance bot for instance lets you set up price alerts and notifications, and the news app look up related news and read summaries.
The Weather application supports caption and share functionality. Caption lets you add text to a weather report before you share it with other users on Facebook Messenger.
Monkeys is a completely different beast bot. It seems aimed at kids, as you interact with it by sending emojis. Different emojis help the monkey perform various activities such as eating, traveling to exotic places, or sending you pics.
To get started, all you have to do is message @YahooFinance, @YahooNews, @YahooWeather or @MonkeyPet on Facebook Messenger.
It is interesting to note that the bots are not available on other platforms -- Web, Windows -- that Facebook Messenger is available on. This might change in the future but Yahoo made no statement about it.
Usefulness of bots
Yahoo's bots, lets put the monkey bot aside for a moment, offer more than just information. If they would just return information, their use would probably be limited. You could as well use a weather, finance or news app on your mobile device, or use a web browser to look up information you are interested in.
The bots provide more functionality than that, and this is probably their greatest strength. While those extra features may not be useful to all, the caption and share feature of the weather app is probably the weakest, the price alert feature of the finance app the strongest, it may be useful to some.
If you spend a lot of time connected to Facebook Messenger, then this may very well be a better option to retrieve news and information provided by these bots.
The bots use Messengers notification system just like any other chat partner. This means that you won't miss out on information even if Facebook Messenger is not open all the time.
Now You: What's your take on the first generation of Yahoo's bots for Facebook Messenger?
Martin, I would appreciate that you do not censor this post, as it’s informative writing.
Onur, there is a misleading statement “[…] GIFs are animated images …”. No, obviously you don’t seem to have take much notice of what you were told back in March regarding; Graphics Interchange Format (GIF).
For example, https://www.ghacks.net/2023/03/31/whats-gif-explanation-and-how-to-use-it/#comment-4562919 (if you had read my replies within that thread, you might have learnt something useful). I even mentioned, “GIF intrinsically supports animated images (GIF89a)”.
You linked to said article, [Related: …] within this article, but have somehow failed to take onboard what support you were given by several more knowledgeable people.
If you used AI to help write this article, it has failed miserably.
AI is stupid, and it will not get any better if we really know how this all works. Prove me wrong.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IYl1sTIOHI
Martin, [#comment-4569908] is only meant to be in: [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/07/09/how-to-send-gifs-on-iphone-two-different-ways/]. Whereas it appears duplicated in several recent random low-quality non relevant articles.
Obviously it [#comment-4569908] was posted: 9 July 2023. Long before this thread even existed… your database is falling over. Those comments are supposed to have unique ID values. It shouldn’t be possible to duplicate the post ID, if the database had referential integrity.
Don’t tell me!
Ghacks wants the state to step in for STATE-MANDATED associations to save jobs!!!
Bring in the dictatorship!!!
And screw Rreedom of Association – too radical for Ghacks maybe
GateKeeper ?
That’s called “appointing” businesses to do the state’s dirty work!!!!!
But the article says itself that those appointed were not happy – implying they had not choice!!!!!!
@The Dark Lady,
@KeZa,
@Database failure,
@Howard Pearce,
@Howard Allan Pearce,
Note: I replaced the quoted URI scheme: https:// with “>>” and posted.
The current ghacks.net is owned by “Softonic International S.A.” (sold by Martin in October 2019), and due to the fate of M&A, ghacks.net has changed in quality.
>> ghacks.net/2023/09/02/microsoft-is-removing-wordpad-from-windows/#comment-4573130
Many Authors of bloggers and advertisers certified by Softonic have joined the site, and the site is full of articles aimed at advertising and clickbait.
>> ghacks.net/2023/08/31/in-windows-11-the-line-between-legitimate-and-adware-becomes-increasingly-blurred/#comment-4573117
As it stands, except for articles by Martin Brinkmann, Mike Turcotte, and Ashwin, they are low quality, unhelpful, and even vicious. It is better not to read those articles.
How to display only articles by a specific author:
Added line to My filters in uBlock Origin: ghacks.net##.hentry,.home-posts,.home-category-post:not(:has-text(/Martin Brinkmann|Mike Turcotte|Ashwin/))
>> ghacks.net/2023/09/01/windows-11-development-overview-of-the-august-2023-changes/#comment-4573033
By the way, if you use an RSS reader, you can track exactly where your comments are (I’m an iPad user, so I use “Feedly Classic”, but for Windows I prefer the desktop app “RSS Guard”).
RSS Guard: Feed reader which supports RSS/ATOM/JSON and many web-based feed services.
>> github.com/martinrotter/rssguard#readme
We all live in digital surveillance glass houses under scrutiny of evil people because of people like Musk. It’s only fair that he takes his turn.
“Operating systems will be required to let the user choose the browser, virtual assistant and search engine of their choice. Microsoft cannot force users to use Bing or Edge. Apple will have to open up its iOS operating system to allow third-party app stores, aka allow sideloading of apps. Google, on the other hand, will need to provide users with the ability to uninstall preloaded apps (bloatware) from Android devices. Online services will need to allow users to unsubscribe from their platform easily. Gatekeepers need to provide interoperability with third-parties that offer similar services.”
Wonderful ! Let’s hope they’ll comply with that law more than they are doing with the GDPR.