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Comment by dvtrn | Hacker News Reader

I'm having the dickens of a time understanding who Facebook built this for. Marketers, right?

Facebook has already launched some features that are clearly related to this, such as the Recommendations product. Imagine posting "anyone know why this thing happened to me?" and being able to answer it in real time?

Writing it out, that example actually seems counter productive to Facebook's vested interest increasing sharing, although I guess if the answer resolves as a comment it aligns incentives?

did you bother to read the article? It's in the very first line "To help advance question answering (QA) and create smarter assistants" -- aka messenger bots / AI assistants / etc

Yes. In fact I did, yet I'm a mere passive user of FB and have never come across QA messenger bots on the platform before, who uses them? I presumed marketers and advertisers.

Is this presumption incorrect? I'm trying to understand who a potential/target/ideal user of this technology would be from Facebook's perspective-a few sentences about mobile users searching for songs but that's it. That doesn't seem answered in the article, I'd appreciate that in the place of snarky assumptions about my reading skills, please and thank you.

Messenger bots are of interest to marketers, but they don't really seem to use them too frequently. Customer support is a much more common use case from my observations.

All that said, even if it were marketers, it seems pretty clear who this is being built for.

Content farms. Maybe they have a vested interest in making all search results completely suck?

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