Facebook Introduced New Feature to Enable P2P Payment Through Its Messenger

Facebook introduced two new features to help users communicate better - payment and group polls in the chast assist. Chat assists enable users to pay their friend using Facebook Messenger while poll is an enhancement of old Facebook Poll.

As users have used Facebook Messenger to communicate with their peers, Facebook provided two new features to enhance the users experience - chat assists and group polls. According to Busines Insider, chat assist use machine learning to prompt users to overtake specific action based on what they typed in the Messenger. While polling allow users to ask question and to evaluate the popular answers.

In chat assist, when users type in specific phrases such as "IOU" or "pay me $10," Facebook Messenger will prompt user to make a payment via debit card or other payment methods. The function has been hinted by one of Facebook executive, vice president of messaging products, David Marcus at Tech Crunch Disrupt event in San Fransisco on Sept. 12 as CNET reported.

In the event, Marcus said the Messenger bots which was kicked-off in April, will be able to support native payments. Currently, Facebook is working with Stripe, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, American Express and others to support payments in Messenger. Messenger is the app which Facebook actively tweak, and since April there are 30,000 bots are made by 34,000 developers.

The chat assist functions with payment and polls are some of the Facebook's new invention to give users enhanced experienced.

"We look at this chat assist function with polls and payments as just another example of offering help to make Messenger users lives easier, " said a Facebook representative to Tech Crunch explaining the new features.

Another new feature, polls allow user to ask a specific question with possible answers. User can send the question and its possible answers to everyone in a group chat, where they then can select the answers. User can see and evaluate the most popular answer.

The polls is basically a revamped version of its 2007 version of Facebook Polls. Facebook removed its polling features in 2013 to replace it with threaded comments. The original Facebook Polls is a favorite tool for marketers, because it was able to generate revenue as an advertising product.

According to Marcus, Facebook Messenger has 300 million active users monthly that use its video and voice calling.

Watch the new tips and trick for Facebook Messenger as provided by CNET below