Facebook palns ambitious plans for messenger 2015
Facebook hasn’t been quite successful with its attempts to branch out into different services. So far the company has only found success in services it has acquired, like WhatsApp with 700 million users , and Instagram with 300 million users .
The only in-house service that has found parallel success to Facebook is its Messenger service, which currently has 500 million active users, and to which the company is already planning major improvements.
David Marcus, Facebook’s vice president of messaging products recently spoke at the Digital Life Design Conference in Munich. He detailed the aggressive roadmap that his company is putting together in 2015 in order to take Facebook Messenger to 1 billion users.
The plans include services like voice-to-text transcription based on machine learning technology,which the company plans to test in Asia where typing can be challenging in certain countries. Marcus did mention the probability of ads eventually, but not in an intrusive way to the user, but more creative alternatives include expanding Messenger to businesses, to help call centers interact with you through Messenger and the company’s Facebook Page.
No details were provided on how early we might see these changes reach Facebook Messenger, but the voice-to-text transcription service would be cool when the end user can’t play your message due to privacy constraints.
