Facebook Missed the Voice-AI Interface and its Banking Chatbots won’t be able to Get Off the Ground – Info Gadgets

Let’s just face it, Facebook missed the boat when it comes to Voice commerce and voice banking. Amazon Alexa and Google Home are useful and the duopoly of the space.

Conversational commerce was once a thing, where Facebook has a history of making promises about VR and chatbots, none of which really came to pass.

Facebook trying to contact banks to build financial products is a big joke. Venmo, Zelle and Square cash are doing quite well, not to mention Paypal’s rapid progress of late, with smart acquisitions.

Facebook never had a clue to add much utility. They missed the boat on monetizing Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. In an era where the world has WeChat and all that Tencent has become, Facebook looks like a relic.

Facebook in 2018 asking Financial to join messenger is like something they should have done in 2014. Kind of late, Mark — late to the party in realizing that advertising should not be your only source of revenue. With voice banking on the rise, who wants to use Messenger or WhatsApp for these things? This is what happens when you have the same CEO, you lose sight of what matters: innovation.

Facebook Has been a Failure of Convenience

In an era of WeChat and Amazon, Facebook is a bit outdated. It’s not a useful app. Neither are WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or Instagram, if I’m going to be honest. The are simply nice to have. But annoying AF!

Without having smart speakers or smart screens that can do great things in the real world, offline, Facebook is stuck in an era where social media mattered. Consumers have moved beyond that reality. Facebook’s Building 8 has really messed up.

Facebook clamoring after the consumer data of banks is like a serious sign it’s lost its way. This sort of news may be good for its ailing stock, but the writing is on the wall: this is one ecosystem of apps in serious trouble because the apps don’t have enough real-world utility, i.e. they aren’t customer-centric.

• According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook has been talking to some big US banks about partnerships. All they can offer are users, promises of engagement, in exchange for data. They don’t have anything else to bring to the table.

Currently, users can send and receive money through Messenger via PayPal, and MasterCard customers can use their card via Messenger with certain retailers. That is, for the poor souls trapped in the Western internet dystopia where WeChat or Alibaba or mini-programs are a dream of another alternative dimension.

The West is in a captured attention economy now 5–10 years behind the internet of New China, that’s my honest opinion.

According to market insiders, Banks have been rapidly releasing new products to keep pace as well. JPMorgan in July launched “Finn,” an online-only bank built for millennials. Competing Goldman Sachs has invested in Circle, a cryptocurrency exchange that boasts more than $2 billion in trades per month. However, banks really have no clue what they are doing. It’s more likely here that Amazon could impact the future of banking than Facebook ever could. Facebook is not a consumer company, it’s just a mere scam of an app totally reliant on Ad-driven revenue and mass-surveillance data mining.

Apple and Facebook, in being unable or unwilling to follow Voice-AI interface, means even the likes of Alibaba, Huawei and Samsung will leap-frog them in the next way to reach consumers after mobile: voice. Voice commerce and voice banking will be as common as people having their groceries delivered in the near future. Facebook is out of the game and still talking about ‘chatbots’? That’s pathetic.