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Comment by rodolphoarruda | Hacker News Reader

I'm in Brazil as well.

Everybody uses Whatsapp. It is now so entrenched into society that it turned to be part of its popular culture. When people say "I'm part of a group of old car enthusiasts", they meant they are part of a Whatsapp group in which they discuss old cars.

Countless online services and apps were replaced by Whatsapp over the years, from the top of my head: all IMs, customer service apps, e-commerce (specially for SMBs), email and collaboration in general. I can't remember the last time I received a proposal or contract to be signed outside Whatsapp. My attorney asks me to send him all sorts of documentation, copies of IDs and legal evidence via Whatsapp because email is not as easy to use as the IM.

Well, it's lunch time. I got to order my Burguer King meal via their Whatsapp order taking bot. How convenient.

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WhatsApp reigns supreme in India as well; we now have characters in TV shows and movies saying lines like, "I will WhatsApp you the details." WhatsApp might be Zuck's most significant purchase for global domination (at least for now).

Exactly. Facebook and WhatsApp likely have very little to worry about. Zuck knows that most users will keep using WhatsApp. However it does show that Facebook is not doing so well. The fact they need WhatsApp user data indicates problems in their "core" product.

Here in The Netherlands, we say "I will app you the details". In certain sentences, it does get a bit confusing.

I'm having a hard time understanding how WhatsApp could be convenient enough to replace most online services and apps. Do you send text messages with some magic keywords to order at Burger King, or is there a person on the other end reading it, or how does that work? How do you pay? How do you browse the menu? I don't understand.

In Central America whatsapp also _is_ basically the Internet along with facebook. There is a person on the other end taking your order and payments are always done in cash, although some advanced delivery drivers now carry a credit card swipe machine. Everything is done through whatsapp: bills, ordering food, govt services, parent teacher communications for children in schools, business introductions (dont know anyone who uses email for this over there). The Internet is whatsapp for these people, there is no such thing as "most online services and apps"

Thank you all for shining a light on this. I didn't know this was so bad. I'm simply annoyed that some social groups use Facebook to organize, our neighborhood group, the parenting class, so I just can't be a part of that and try to move individual people, like my immediate neighbors, onto other platforms. But "bills, ordering food, govt services, parent teacher communications", that's extreme.

At least for bills and govt services I wonder, who approves something like that?

> parent teacher communications

Where we are (EU) schools have been told not to touch WhatsApp, so official school-parent communication goes via other channels.

However parents still end up creating WhatsApp groups for each class to exchange messages and chase lost bits of homework and so on.

Feels like it's almost like like a virus ... <sigh>

> parent teacher communications

Yes, that one is another good example.

My kids' school has 3 different learning management systems (not integrated, BTW) to which students need to submit their homework/assignments. Well, at least in theory.

In practice, parents take photos of homework and send them to teachers via Whatsapp completely ignoring a formal system maintained for that purpose. Poor teachers have to save the time to upload files from their phones/computers to the system later and keep things organized from school's internal perspective.

I thought about proposing to school's IT that they changed the process, allowing parents to email files to a certain inbox, which an app would collect the files later and push them into the system automatically. I ended up not going ahead with the proposal because I already knew their reaction to me: "Whatsapp makes the process simpler".

I've worked in technical support in Central America and there's something I noticed with some users. Like those younger than 25 y/o users or older than 65 y/o.

For them, their phone is their first computer and they never really used e-mail.

Some of them can't recall their e-mail addresses or less their e-mail passwords.

This happens even if Android is the most popular phone and requires a GMail account to be properly set up.

They just create a new GMail account when they get a new phone or somtimes just keep using the GMail account from the previous owner instead.

> "whatsapp also _is_ basically the Internet"

this is the best description I've read so far.

So bots exist or no?

Honestly in that rare instance sheds you need to chat with an Intercom website, would much rather do it in WhatsAppWeb or via cell

As an end user I keep WhatsApp open on my computer, because it makes it very easy to copy and paste text, screenshots or files.

From the business side.

Big companies use bots and ticketing systems based on the WhatsApp API.

Smaller stores can handle with WhatsApp for phone or Web.

It works similar to talking to a robot via voice call. When you start the chat with the bot it will answer with a standard message saying things like "Hi, welcome to XXX" and present you with a fixed menu of options like "type 1 to create a new order" or "type 2 to inquire about an existing order" and so on. At certain points the chat may be transferred to a human.

Some places might also try to use a more clever bot where you write down what you want and the bot gives a canned response if it thinks it understands what you meant (often just looking at keywords). These can be frustrating to use, just like those voice call bots that use voice recognition.

Don't know if they have a video example or something, but:

https://www.ordering.co/whatsapp-ordering

EDIT: They do have an example that you can try out, around the middle of the page

See my post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25679759

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