Business news site Quartz has launched on the Facebook Messenger app as a way to distribute its stories, reports Shan Wang of Nieman Lab.
Wang writes, “The bot will learn and ‘will shape the experience to you and your habits,’ Quartz says in its announcement of the new bot experience.
“(Quartz emphasizes that this is not a replica of its main, chat-focused news app, which has been fiddling with augmented reality capabilities and which Quartz claims has been seen ‘over one million downloads.’)
“After tapping through a series of funny introductory chat options, the bot begins to offer a lot of options to explore, from art exhibits to news (at least for me this morning, the news experience on Messenger and on the news app are exactly the same, with the same buttons to tap, the same gifs and emojis, and the same articles on the healthcare industry ‘bracing for Amazon’s impact’ and the gender gap). I then tried to go back to the content options the bot offered me when I first launched it, and got into a brief loop of the bot not understanding my demands, before finally getting into a series of messages on productivity and a framework for improving that.
Read more here.
