nterprise Chat News Roundup #13
It’s almost Thanksgiving! 🦃 🍽
Here’s what you need to know in enterprise chat news this week:
Messenger becomes a business tool
👥 💬
The Facebook Messenger team dropped a major announcement for their platform introducing a new customer chat tool for businesses. With this 2.2 release, Messenger looks to connect businesses and their customers in new ways while offering a familiar chat experience. Businesses will now be able to offer a live chat widget, similar to the likes of Intercom, so that customers can reach out with any questions.
Just another move from Facebook showing their interest on the enterprise chat space, while Workplace by Facebook tackles a team’s internal communication, they’re hoping to have Messenger tackle the external communication.
At launch, there are a few beta partners that will be implementing the customer chat plugin like Adore Me, Air France, Total Activation, Volaris and more, while the rest of us can sign up for the waitlist as the plugin becomes more widely available.
See the full announcement alongside new features rolling out alongside the customer chat plugin:
Quip beefs its collaboration offerings
💪
Dreamforce 2017 happened last week and Quip was busy dropping new features to enhance their document collaboration tool.
With new features surrounding Workflows and Live Apps, Quip is looking to become much like the rest of Salesforce’s offerings by way of a customizable tool that can be built upon. Live Apps will allow for things like embedded polls, calendars and image annotations within Quip so users can collaborate across comments and mentions.
Alongside their new live apps, they’ve also signed on 3 major enterprise chat platform partners to offer users the ability to collaborate on interactive documents — win/win for enterprise chat customers. 👥
Check out the announcement and Live Apps API:
Microsoft Teams reaches the classroom
📚 📝
Teachers rejoice! 👩🏫
Microsoft Teams is looking to make it a lot harder to argue that a dog ate a students homework. 🐶
From an announcement earlier in the week, Microsoft Teams is making it easier for Office 365 education users to manage their classroom by distributing, managing and overseeing assignments using a combination of Microsoft Teams and OneNote. Similar to how managers use Microsoft Teams to work with their staff, teachers will find ways to leverage reporting to handle in class assignments.
As it stands, Teams will be acting as a springboard for conversations between teachers and students that are focused on classroom assignments.
Check out their school support announcement:
Google launches tools to build bots
🤖 🛠
Good news for all of our fellow developers! 💻 ⚒
Google is launching a beta program to enrich conversational apps by offering a more natural experience. With the launch of their Dialogflow Enterprise Edition, Google is catering to enterprises who don’t mind paying a fee in return for 24/7 support, SLAs and enterprise-level terms of services that guarantee data protection.
Dialogflow’s enterprise offering will be well received for companies looking to build conversational interfaces for their websites, apps, messaging platforms, and IoT devices.
