Facebook rolls out 'Discover' to quickly find and interact with Messenger bots

Announced at F8, Facebook is rolling out a new feature, 'Discover,' a hub inside Messenger to quickly find new bots to interact with. Available only to the US users, Discover will be social network's yet another effort at reconciling with chatbots.

"Our goal with Discover is to ensure that experiences in Messenger are compelling, high quality and easy to find," Facebook said in a statement on its blog. "This latest update makes it even more intuitive for people to find what they care about most."

Using 'Discover' is quite easy. When you tap on the Discover icon in the lower right-hand corner of the Messenger Home screen, you can browse by categories of bots, see recently visited businesses or check the featured bots. Messenger also includes a broader set of categories like news, entertainment and finance, among others, to help users narrow down their bot searches.

There is no denying the fact that Facebook has had little success with chatbots. However, if businesses do adopt chatbots as a medium to connect with their users, Facebook as the facilitator will stand much to gain. Discover will make it easier to find bots sure, but the feature seems to be more about re-emphasizing the chatbots medium.

In March, Facebook acknowledged that its bots hit a failure rate of 70 percent. This means Facebook's bot could fulfill only 30 percent of requests without human intervention. Early Messenger bots were plagued with bugs and didn't have the ability to maintain relatively basic conversations. At a tech conference last September, Facebook's head of Messenger, David Marcus, admitted that bots were "overhyped."

With the latest feature, Facebook is hoping to revive bots by attracting the interest of brands and marketers.