Chatbots are all the rage and WhatsApp aims to be the next platform to prove it. Just a few hours ago, when I told you that Discord would soon be removing its chatbot, I mentioned the strangeness of this move, as it goes in the opposite direction if we compare it to what tech companies have been doing lately. In fact, I’ll admit that I’ve been thinking about such an unusual decision since I wrote that report, and that my surprise was heightened when I learned of the move from the Met.

That Those responsible for WhatsApp have been working for months to launch their own chatbots Unsurprisingly, in fact we already had news about her at the end of September and that one of the key goals that Meta is pursuing with this news will be to attract younger users, which, as we have mentioned on previous occasions, is the audience that most misses the set of services offered by companies. To this end, their intention was not to create a single chatbot, but a wide collection of them with the most diverse personalities, some general and others specialized.

We already knew that unofficially at the time, and Meta subsequently confirmed it Their intention is to bring chatbots to all their platforms and not only on social networks (Facebook and Instagram), as some rumors suggested at the beginning. And as confirmation, shortly after, a very small selection of WhatsApp Android beta users saw a new control appear in their interface that allowed them to summon a chatbot.

That initial test, as I mentioned, was extremely limited in scope, but as we can read in WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is significantly expanding the scope of the beta version of its chatbots. This increase in scale shows that the first tests have been successful and therefore Meta is now in a position to verify that the capacity of its current infrastructure is able to meet the expected demand for this new feature.

This is particularly interesting because He tells us that Meta would have already verified the operation of these chatbots, based on Llama-2, because otherwise they would not expand the scope of the test, much less significantly. Obviously, by expanding the test to more users, it is possible to uncover bugs that were not identified in the first phase, but it seems likely that they will be smaller in number and severity.

So, barring any last-minute surprises, either in its operation or in the need to secure resources to adequately provide the chatbot function, we can think that their arrival on WhatsApp is closer than we thought. Will it arrive in time for Christmas? Perhaps this is too much of a deadline, although it makes sense to think that Meta is trying to say goodbye to the year, or at most welcome the year 2024, when chatbots are already functional.