Introducing the Pinterest chat extension and bot for Messenger

Hayder Casey, Pinterest engineering manager, Growth

More than 200 million people use Pinterest every month to find ideas to try, from recipes to gifts to decor for the home. Family and friends are often a big part of these plans, and that’s why nearly 1M Pins are shared to Facebook Messenger each week. Today we’re making it easier for Pinners to collaborate with others on Messenger by launching a new chat extension and bot.

Pinterest chat extension for Messenger

We’re rolling out a Pinterest chat extension to make it simpler to share Pins and collaborate with family and friends directly from Messenger. Now Pinners can easily share ideas without ever having to leave the Messenger conversation. And starting today, Pins shared from our mobile apps to Messenger will link to our chat extension using a newly launched SDK from Messenger.

With an improved sharing experience, now the full Pin’s image will be shown in Messenger once shared. If you tap on a Pin in Messenger, you’ll see a richer, more integrated experience through the chat extension which makes responding to ideas, sharing new Pins and accessing Pinterest Search and Related Pins quicker and easier than ever.

We designed the experience with the most popular ways people share Pins to Messenger in mind. We scoped the requirements to:

• Performance–Users will be on the go, so it needs to load fast.
• Viewing–Show the full image and make it simple to visit the article when available.
• Ease of use–Enable people to browse and search related content on Pinterest and easily share it back to the conversation.

We built the extension on top of our mobile web platform in React. This was an efficient route to leverage existing infrastructure. We removed all the chrome and banners to take advantage of the available space to show content.

Pinterest bot for Messenger

We’re also rolling out a Pinterest bot to bring the power of Pinterest Search to Messenger, and help Pinners find recipes, products, style inspiration and other ideas. To get started, chat the bot and select a topic like “food,” “home” or “DIY” to get recommendations from our dataset of +100B ideas.

You can also search for ideas to try, from cocktail recipes to holiday outfits, right from the Pinterest bot.

This is an early exploration into AI interactions for Pinterest, allowing users to engage with the product in a more natural and conversational way. Although this is a first step, we’re excited about the potential for future iterations.

The Pinterest chat extension will be rolling out to Pinners using the English language version of our app on iPhone and Android over the coming days, and the bot will be available across all platforms, mobile and web. Be sure to update your Pinterest app to version 6.40 on iOS and 6.45 on Android.