Meta has announced that its customer support AI bot, now called Meta Business Agent, will be available globally on WhatsApp.
This launch follows nearly two years of testing AI agents for customer support in WhatsApp Business in countries such as India and Mexico.
Meta stated that the AI agent can respond to customer inquiries, suggest products, schedule appointments, qualify sales leads, and redirect questions to a human if necessary. The bot will also be accessible through Instagram DMs.
Additionally, Meta is experimenting with a feature that allows the Business Agent to provide daily summaries of chats that took place overnight and offer insights.
This feature is currently being tested with select accounts on WhatsApp Business, Instagram Pro, Messenger, and Meta Business Suite.
The company is also working on adding features like conducting market research, showcasing product features, managing users’ calendars, and connecting with tools to gather competitive insights.
Meta plans to charge businesses for using this AI agent by incorporating it into certain tiers of its WhatsApp Business Premium subscription. Large businesses will be billed based on the number of tokens they use.
WhatsApp will now let users identify scams with new feature
Earlier, WhatsApp announced that it is working on a new security feature, called Scam Alert, to assist people with identifying potentially fraudulent messages from contacts they don’t know.
The feature has been seen in WhatsApp beta for Android 2.26.22.4, and is currently being developed.
The new feature works by building on WhatsApp’s existing use of on-device processing, which is already used for voice message transcripts.
Additionally, this system would give voice notes to text directly on the recipient’s phone, and neither WhatsApp nor a third party could get a hold on the content of the voice notes.
