Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Facebook

Meta Wants Your AR-Powered Ray Bans to Remind You to Buy Milk

We’ve covered augmented reality tech that helps you cook in your home kitchen or visualize items in a food court, but what about reminding you to buy milk or eggs at the grocery store?

That’s a scenario Facebook parent Meta describes in a new patent awarded to the company for a smart assistant for augmented reality hardware as first reported by longtime tech and entertainment reporter (and former coworker of mine) Janko Roettgers on his blog Lowpass.

According to the patent, the Meta smart assistant app would be used on smart glasses (such as its Ray-Ban Stories wearables) through both reminders and geo-aware contextual information provided by GPS signals:

  • Another example shown in the application (and atop this article, if you’re reading it on the web) is a reminder to buy milk. The assistant then figures out that the best time to deliver this reminder is when the user goes to the store.
  • From the filing: “The assistant system may determine that the user is at a supermarket/grocery store based on … the user’s location information captured by GPS signals or visual signals captured by the smart AR/VR glasses” and then remind them to buy milk.

I’d find this type of application useful, but where I’d really like to see this go is to provide in-store navigation information (like help me find milk in a grocery store) or to provide additional contextual information as I compare items on a store shelf (which items has lower sugar or doesn’t have gluten, for example).

That would require in-store beacons and sensors, which we’re already starting to see make their way into stores to power contactless retail systems. This type of in-store contextual AR info would be even more useful for grocery store employees, as they restock shelves, check prices or check to see if an item is in stock.

Restaurants, Welcome to the Metaverse

Restaurants, welcome to the metaverse.

It’s not just a vision that’s 5 or 10 years away. It’s here now. 

For Halloween, Chipotle created a virtual restaurant inside the online game platform Roblox to give away $1 million in free burritos. Fans and gamers could enter the restaurant, experience a Halloween-themed Chipotle, and get a promo code for a free burrito in the real world.

This is a preview of what we can expect to see in the years to come. The next generation of diners will order their food and discover where they are going for their next night out from inside augmented and virtual worlds created by the likes of Epic, Roblox, and Facebook. And the best hospitality companies (and hospitality tech companies) will not wait too long to adapt.

Here are seven ways that restaurants will change in the metaverse:

  1. Marketplaces – apps won’t be the primary ordering channel anymore once more people begin to participate in the metaverse. Companies like Doordash, UberEats and GrubHub will need to rethink their strategy as ordering and discovery will be embedded in more interoperable experiences. Doordash moving to become a pure logistics API is smart because they will be protected if they lose the ordering portal in the metaverse — someone still has to deliver the food after all.
  2. Marketing – brands will start integrating food into virtual experiences. Instead of traditional email marketing, restaurants will be able to recreate their physical space in the metaverse and invite guests from around the world. The metaverse will create new opportunities to test promotions and loyalty programs, just like Chipotle showed by launching their Boorito promo as digital-only this year.
  3. Reservations – the interface for booking a table will completely change. Diners will do a quick virtual tour before booking the specific table they want. Pricing will be dynamic for the very best tables.
  4. Delivery – ghost kitchens will be the building blocks of group ordering in the metaverse. You’ll be able to share a meal with your friends delivered to you at the same time even if you are halfway across the globe.
  5. QR codes – QR codes will be more than just menus. They will be the access point for augmented reality. Friends from the metaverse who can’t make the night out will be able to join in on the fun and send your party a bottle of champagne to celebrate.
  6. Payments – while we expect restaurants to always take dollars, we think the metaverse will have a few different major cryptocurrencies that rise to the top over the next 5 years. The currency that a restaurant accepts will be part of its identity and marketing efforts.
  7. Membership – members-only hospitality experiences like SOHO house will extend their house into the digital realm. Members will have access to exclusive digital worlds if they own the right (non-fungible token) NFT to get in the front door. These NFTs will be traded on open marketplaces as keys to different clubs.

Most of us love sitting down with friends at a restaurant with a chill vibe and having a great conversation in the real world. The metaverse will not change that. Restaurants will continue to provide those unique experiences. But within the metaverse, restaurants will be able to reach more guests that might not always be able to show up in person.

Steve Simoni is CEO of BBot, a maker of smart ordering technology for restaurants and the hospitality industry.

Attention Nana and Pop-Pop: Facebook Portal Adds Recipe App SideChef

Over the past few years, the Amazon Echo Show has become extremely popular as a smart assistant for the kitchen, allowing consumers to quickly access recipes, watch videos, and connect to smart devices.

The Facebook Portal, on the other hand, has largely languished since its release in late 2018 as consumers resisted adding a video-enabled device to their homes from a company that has proven an unreliable steward of their privacy.

However, with the arrival of COVID-19, it seems like the Portal may finally be getting a little traction from its most reliable demographic (seniors) as many of the homebound silver-haired set looks for ways to connect with family during quarantine-times. And now, they can get in on some of that cooking action, too, as Portal added the SideChef smart recipe app to its store last week.

From the SideChef announcement:

SideChef’s signature “smart recipe” format ensures a seamless cooking experience for home cooks of all skill levels with its easy-to-follow guided video recipes, which has been adapted to also fit the screen size for Portal devices.

While the cooking guidance on a kitchen screen is a nice feature to have, I suspect it may be the integration with AmazonFresh that might be a bigger selling point for seniors. My own 70-something mom started using online grocery for the first time during the pandemic, and I’m sure she’d love to add items to her shopping list and order while working in the kitchen.

While the Portal does have Alexa built-in, I’m not sure if the Portal’s Alexa integration connects to Amazon’s delivery service via SideChef (SideChef does work with Alexa on native Amazon devices). If that is the case, it might just the recipe to sell my own Alexa-loving mom on putting a Portal in the kitchen.

For SideChef, Facebook is yet another partner in a long list of integrations for the guided cooking and smart kitchen app over the past few years including Samsung’s Bixby, Amazon Fresh (as mentioned), and GE/Haier to name a few.

According to SideChef, the app is available now for the Portal Mini, Portal, and Portal+.

Food Tech News Roundup: Fungi Burgers, Pineapple Beer, and Chatbot Bartenders

Summer has descended upon us like a thick, laze-inducing haze. If you’re like us, all you want to do is head to the local pool and drink cool beverages out of our stainless steel straws.

Steamy weekends are not the time for more work, so we went ahead and rounded up some news-worthy food tech stories from around the web for your reading pleasure. Bonus: you can peruse while you’re lounging in air conditioning.

Bronx Brewery Beer Fights Produce Waste
On July 30th New York’s Bronx Brewery will release a beer made with repurposed food scraps. Called More To The Core, it’s a Kolsch style ale brewed with pineapple cores and skins, which are normally tossed into the trash and end up in landfills. This tasty, waste-y beer is a collaboration between Baldor Specialty Foods and The Bronx Brewery, and is available in their taproom.

 

Capital sprouts up for fungi-based meat company
This week Terramino Foods, a startup which uses fungi to make meat and seafood alternatives, raised $4.25 million in a seed funding round co-led by Collaborative Fund and True Ventures. In a press release, True Ventures indicated that Terramino Foods has already developed a plant-based salmon burger, and has plans to create alternatives to beef, chicken, and pork with its new capital. 

 

Costco partners with Zest Labs to optimize food supply chain
Wholesale giant Costco announced this week that it would start working with Zest Labs, a company which works in fresh food supply chain traceability. According to a press release, Costco is expecting this partnership to help modernize and optimize their fresh foods, reducing food waste up to 50%.

 

McDonald’s workers are short on soft skills
This week McDonald’s released the results of its Workplace Preparedness Study, which analyzed skill development across multiple age groups. The survey polled 6,200 people and discovered that many were missing soft skills, such as teamwork, customer service, and responsibility. We’ve addressed the restaurant labor shortage before on the Spoon, and have wondered if companies will pad their meager workforce with robots in coming years. But will robots have better soft skills than teenagers looking for a summer job? Or maybe the robots will take over the physically repetitive jobs, like food prep and dish running, freeing up people with soft skills to interact with customers.

 

Allrecipes & Tito’s vodka launch Barkeep, a chatbot ‘bartender’

Ready to get your drink on through Facebook? Allrecipes and Tito’s vodka got you covered. The recipe site is working with the Austin, TX craft vodka maker to launch a chatbot by the name of Barkeep using Facebook Messenger chatbot platform. After checking if the user is of legal drinking age, Barkeep suggests a few cocktails (using Tito’s, natch) and then walks the user through a conversation branch flow that has the user ultimately choose a cocktail recipe. Once a recipe is picked and the user is sent to Allrecipes, they can then order their some Tito’s or other liquor through Drizly. You can try Barkeep out for yourself here.

Did we miss anything? Tweet us @TheSpoonTech!

Should Other Cities Follow Mountain View’s Free Office Lunch Ban?

Growing up, my Pappy Albrecht used to say, “Life’s not fair and there are no free lunches.” This bit of wisdom will be especially true for some Facebook employees moving into their new offices this Fall, as Mountain View, CA passed a rule that will prohibit the social network from offering free lunches inside their new location.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that as Facebook settles into its new Village at San Antonio office park:

“Under Mountain View’s rules for the Village complex, meals within the offices can’t be subsidized by more than 50 percent on a regular basis. Facebook can fully subsidize employees if they go to restaurants that are open to the public.”

This is, of course, about money. Rather than cloistering up in their shiny new offices, Mountain View wants those thousands of employees interacting with and buying meals from local businesses. Though the rule was enacted back in 2014, it’s even more relevant today as part of a larger discussion about income disparity, especially in the Bay Area, which has become all but unaffordable unless you’re living large on stock options.

Free lunches are table stakes anymore for tech companies competing to attract talent. Offering free meals intentionally keeps workers in the office so they can theoretically be more productive. But is effectively banning this perk the right solution?

I’m honestly not sure. There is something unsettling about the government making rules about where and how a private business’ employees can eat. But at the same time, tech companies have exacerbated wealth inequality, don’t really seem to be doing anything about it, and keeping employees inside office walls on purpose keeps them from going out into the world and supporting local communities. Maybe they need a little nudge.

So far, other Bay Area cities are shying away from their own free lunch bans, but if Mountain Views’ move winds up generating substantial income, other municipalities might look to follow suit. If so, this could have a ripple effect on the rapidly maturing corporate catering market, which has seen real money flow into it. A number of corporate catering companies such as Hungry, ZeroCater and ezCater have raised millions of dollars just this year. A widespread regulatory revolt would negatively impact the sector.

Who knows? Maybe Facebook will embrace this new rule and use, or more likely create, a service like AllSet, which helps companies facilitate buying lunch for employees at nearby restaurants. This in turn could spark a new way of offering the free lunch perk while supporting local communities.

What do you think about the future of free lunches? Leave us a comment and let us know, or come to our Smart Kitchen Summit in October where one of our discussions will be “Leave The Lunch Box Behind: How Tech Is Changing How We Eat At Work.”

Facebook’s New Patent Will Enable It To See Into Your Fridge & Suggest a Recipe

Facebook was issued a new patent today outlining a system that would allow users to access and control networked devices in the home through their mobile app and enable the social network to serve up ads based on the contents of a person’s fridge or other data gathered from inside the home.

The patent, called “Controlling Devices Through Social Media” (US patent #9,967,259), explains a number of scenarios in which Facebook users may access and control networked devices in the home. They also outlined how the could provide recommendations for the user based on data gathered from in-home sensors and cameras, as well as information from the person’s Facebook profile.

One such example has Facebook accessing a camera within a refrigerator and providing a meal recommendation. From the patent:

As an example and not by way of limitation, a refrigerator may include cameras to take pictures of items placed in the refrigerator and upload the images to the cloud, where image recognition may be performed upon the images, and an identification of the items may be provided to the refrigerator. As another example, a refrigerator may retrieve recipes from the cloud based on the items in the refrigerator and user-preference information from the user’s social network.

Facebook’s patent also outlines how it could notify the user when their milk is about to expire or they’re out of eggs. If that isn’t weird or creepy enough, they also outline scenarios where they would send targeted advertising to people within the person’s social graph.

From the patent:

“…as an example and not by way of limitation, a user may purchase a particular brand of hot sauce, and a target group of users may receive a notification based on their affinity for that brand of hot sauce or for hot sauce in general.”

Now, it may seem a bit strange for Facebook to be pushing even further into our lives at a time when many of us (including the government) have a heightened concern about how much information we provide to the social network. But in its defense, the patent was filed back in a simpler time – July 2014 – when many of today’s privacy concerns weren’t as front and center.

It also should be noted that at the time Facebook filed its patent, it had grand designs on making Facebook an IoT platform. However, in 2016 the company decided to shelve Parse, the IoT platform it had spent a few years developing.

All that said, it’s worth keeping an eye on this patent in case Facebook decides to revive its push to connect itself to our physical world.

Emoji Menus

Could Emojis Really Change the Way We Order Our Food?

Fine-dining restaurant Dallas Fish Market recently held a $65-per-person dinner event, but it wasn’t the watermelon lobster or sesame-seed ice creams that were the main hit. It was a menu written entirely in emojis.

The upscale seafood joint got its inspiration when Nafees Alam, CEO of DRG Concepts, who owns the restaurant, came across an ice cream shop in Singapore with an emoji menu. Clearly it was a good idea to take the concept Stateside, as Dallas Fish Market sold out of its first “emoji dinner” event and has a second one coming up in about a week. The event menus have no text or photos, just emojis of the available food items. Guests are encouraged to correctly match the dish they’re eating to the corresponding emoji. There are bound to be surprises, since we don’t yet have icons for ingredients like saffron or truffle oil.

It sounds like an entertaining evening packed with laughs, but actually, there are some practical business reasons for incorporating emoji menus into a restaurant strategy.

For one, it’s a new way of using technology to interact with diners and create extra buzz. London restaurant The Little Yellow Door has regular emoji menu dinners, calling the concept “a cool way to engage with our audience.” Diners have to guess what’s on the menu before choosing a dish and ordering it via WhatsApp. Dallas Fish Market, meanwhile, noted an uptick in attention on social media thanks to all the photos and mentions guests posted on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. And over in Bankok, Thailand, Gaggan has only emojis on its 20-plus-course menu. It’s also been voted “Asia’s Best Restaurant” for three straight years. Presumably, Gaggan’s creative take on Indian food has a lot to do with that award, but pairing unusual dishes with an unusual menu is a great example of how a simple technology like emojis can be used to further enhance the restaurant experience.

And you don’t have to serve a 22-course meal to do that. Domino’s Pizza is using emoji-based menus to streamline the order process, with its Domino’s AnyWare program. Save your basic info and preferences, text the pizza slice emoji to Domino’s, and wait for your pie to be delivered. Pizza Hut has tested something similar. Fooji, meanwhile, takes this idea step further: tweet the company a food emoji, and, using algorithms, they’ll pick a meal from a top-rated restaurant and have it delivered to you.

Of course this all sounds like a blast when you’re just talking about it, but emoji menus, for all their practical uses, also have some practical hurdles to jump in order to get more popular. How difficult a concept will this be for the local deli or noodle bar to implement? What happens if you order a salad and it comes unexpectedly doused in truffle oil? As Foodji founder Gregg Morton told Eater last year, “It really is food roulette.” And not everyone wants to play food roulette for lunch.

There’s also the matter of dietary restrictions. At present, anyone with health- or religious-based food restrictions would be hard-pressed to find something to eat via emoji menus. But that alone could create a whole new world of business, for restaurants, researchers, and app makers alike. I’m not yet convinced emoji-based menus will go mainstream anytime soon, but we’re likely to see them incorporated into some very creative food concepts in the near future.

From Pokes to Poke Bowls, Facebook Expands Food Delivery

Facebook officially expanded its food delivery service today, allowing users to order eats from local restaurants, national restaurant chains and food ordering services, all within its app.

The program was announced last October and started appearing slowly earlier this year. With today’s announcement, food ordering is being rolled out across the U.S. and is available via its iOS, Android and desktop apps. Check it out in action in this video:

Sadly, this means Mark Zuckerberg will not be donning a baseball cap and hopping into a beat up VW Scirocco to personally deliver a pizza pie to your door. Rather, Facebook is serving as a mechanism for your food delivery. From the announcement post:

People will be able to browse restaurants near them that take orders via Delivery.com, DoorDash, ChowNow, Zuppler, EatStreet, Slice, and Olo, as well as directly from restaurants including Papa John’s, Wingstop, Panera, Jack in the Box, TGI Friday’s, Denny’s, El Pollo Loco, Chipotle, Five Guys and Jimmy John’s.

Which makes sense, given that Facebook doesn’t really want to get into delivering actual food. But it does want all the data that goes along with your ordering food — what you order, when you order, where from, how often, etc.. As TechCrunch points out, Facebook isn’t even charging any fees or sharing any portion of the profits from orders placed via its app.

Facebook isn’t the only tech giant offering food delivery via its app. Google offers delivery options through Google Maps, and Amazon offers restaurant delivery for Prime members, and that’s in addition to standalone services like Grubhub and Caviar.

From Food Bot Discovery to Suggestions, Facebook Messenger Gets Smarter

From guidelines to making the perfect steak to numerous other conversational cooking applications, food-focused bots on Facebook Messenger have been advancing rapidly. Now, along with numerous other advancements, Facebook has launched new features that make discovering and trying new food bots much easier. At its F8 conference in April, the company announced new “Discover” features that would demystify finding an interacting with the best bots, and these features officially launched this week for users in the United States, along with new chat extensions that allow users to conversationally interact with sites such as OpenTable.

Messenger has more than a billion downloads on Google Play alone, and Facebook confirms that more than 1.2 billion users use Messenger each month. Its popularity is giving rise to an enthusiastic community of bot builders. The company has been adding chatbot  features within the nucleus of Messenger through its “M” AI assistant. We’ve written before about cooking with the Joule sous vide machine using Messenger, and new bots are taking conversational cooking in many directions.

So how do you discover the best bots and food oriented businesses and sites that you can interact with? On the lower right side of your Messenger home screen, touching a Discover button brings up categories that you can investigate, including one for Food & Drink. This lets you investigate organizations working with Messenger ranging from The Food Network to restaurants.

You can also investigate a “Featured” section to identify interesting new bots. A video from Facebook shows these features in action.

Bot developers and businesses can also now interact directly with users within Messenger chats. For example, you can reserve tables at restaurants conversationally via OpenTable. These features are enabled through Chat Extensions, which were also first announced at the F8 conference.

“Our goal with Discover is to ensure that experiences in Messenger are compelling, high quality and easy to find. This latest update makes it even more intuitive for people to find what they care about most,” writes Yingming Chen, a Facebook Messenger Engineer.

For developers and businesses interested in getting their bots or conversational cooking experiences added to the Discover section, submission instructions are found here.

Finally, Facebook has also made improvements to M, its AI-fueled personal assistant. As seen below, whether you are having a conversation with a person or a bot, M now intelligently suggests a “Save it for Later” option. If M senses that you are trading URLs for say, vegan recipes, it will automatically suggest that you save the links for later.  In addition to links M will suggest that you may want to save Facebook posts, videos and more.

Behind The Bot: Meet Sure, A Chatbot That Recommends Instagram Food Hotspots

While some people get downright grumpy when it comes to seeing food pics posted in their Facebook and Instagram feeds, I’m one of those that actually enjoys them. In fact, when I see someone showing off a tasty platter from a local restaurant on Instagram, I’ll often make a mental note to check that place out if it’s in my town or somewhere I plan on visiting soon.

If you use Instagram food posts as a restaurant discovery tool like me, I have good news: there’s now a bot that looks for Instagram hotspots and surfaces them in the form of restaurant recommendations. The chatbot is called Sure, and it’s a Facebook Messenger chatbot that curates the most Instagrammed food and drink spots in your neighborhood.

I interviewed the Juraj Pal, the CEO of Sure, to hear about how the idea for the bot came together.

Where did you get the idea for your bot?

Our motivation was simple. We weren’t satisfied with the existing restaurant discovery and travel apps and we quickly started believing that we can build a much better product for the next generation, already spending more time in messaging apps.

Having grown up with internet, we have soon learnt that virtually anything was accessible on our fingertips. It opened up a whole world of opportunities for us. But at the same, it made us feel overwhelmed with choices and options.

At first we actually started with a spreadsheet full of restaurants, cafes and bars that we curated ourselves. And to validate the idea, we launched a simple SMS bot where users would text our number and we would reply manually to each message, recommending a spot from our spreadsheet.

By tying visual social content to specific food locations, are you tapping into how you think this is how Millennials and others choose food?

We knew that others tried to solve this problem and the space is crowded with big players like Yelp or Foursquare. But we truly believe that for the new generation, they just don’t get it.

We quickly learned that millennials trust their friends and influencers more than reviews from strangers on Yelp. Rather than providing endless results like Google, we turned to Instagram as our primary source of all recommendations.

Why did you choose to use Facebook Messenger vs other platforms?

Other than having 1.2B monthly active users, Facebook Messenger is inherently social which makes it easy for people to share with their friends.

The social aspect has however been important also from another angle. When it comes to choosing a place to eat out, majority of the people ask their friends or influencers who they can relate to. By being on a platform where our users naturally chat with their friends, chatbot has the potential to blur the lines between tech algorithms and word of mouth recommendations.

What is unique about developing for a chatbot vs. other AI platforms?

We’ve seen different roles evolve as we were building the chatbot. We for example spend much more time on copywriting and building the bot’s persona and empathy than designing flows.

Building chatbots also costs less and happens much faster. And this in turn allows us to ship our product faster and iterate based on feedback we get. And what I love the most about this experimentation is that we’re focused on value delivery, rather than building potentially useless product features.

Why a food-focused bot?

We decided to start by answering the ‘Where shall we eat?’ question once and for all. Food is a highly personal choice that represents who we are and ties us with a community. Also, in the digitalised world we live in today, eating out is one of the few experiences that we cannot replicate online.

And since people are used to asking their friends for food recommendations on Messenger, we though we could be that concierge friend for everything when you’re out an about.

What have you learned since people have started using your bot?

A lot! There are literally 1000 ways how a person can ask for a restaurant recommendation and trying to support that with natural language processing is hard. Based on this we decided to switch to more pre-defined text and using more GUI elements.

Also, people love to test the boundaries of a bot and eventually they want to break it. Hence it’s equally important to educate our users how to talk to a bot, as it is building a responsive bot.

Finally, the speed in which we were able to capture learnings and improve the experience based on real usage was incredible. As opposed to cross-platform app development, we can instantly ship updates to all of our users without any disturbance.

Tell us a little about yourself – is this your first bot? 

I’ve founded and sold a startup in the food tech space in the past but this is my first chatbot.

What do you have in store for Sure?

After we launched on Product Hunt and expanded Sure to 22 cities around the world 2 months ago, we joined the Just Eat food tech accelerator in London.

We’re currently working on bringing the Sure experience into group chats and making it even more contextual as we grow to become the ultimate concierge for everything when you’re out and about – from choosing a restaurant to ordering an Uber to get home from a bar.

Tell us about your recently launched Sure extension for Messenger

We know that the way we discover restaurants is often by asking one of our friends. But many times, choosing a place to go with your friends can turn into a frustrating argument. This was the main motivation for launching our latest feature, the Messenger Chat Extension. This allows all our user to take the Sure bot with them to any group chat on Messenger and instantly share our recommendations with their friends. With this, we’re hoping to put an end to the “Where should we eat?” ordeal.

Is Facebook’s New Food Ordering A Giant Misstep?

In Facebook’s attempt to keep the users on the site more than the average of 50 minutes per day, the company has added food ordering to its roster of activities. So, now, in addition to playing games, pinging your elementary school friends and sharing your Kickstarter faves, you can click and order food from local restaurants.

The feature, recently added to Facebook’s mobile and webtop sites, is basic in its operation. Depending on security settings, the “Order Food” option on the menu (marked with a hamburger emoji) will either populate nearby establishments or allow you to search based on location. A story in TechCrunch reports the new service will be powered by Delivery.com and Slice.

Rather than making a big splash with the announcement, Facebook mentioned food ordering in an October 2016 release. The news was lumped in with other planned capabilities, such as requesting appointments, buying movie tickets and getting quotes from local businesses. In short, it’s the concept of throwing ideas against a wall and seeing what will stick.

Because of Facebook’s reach and market clout, this new capability may be considered a threat to established player such as GrubHub (whose stock took an immediate hit).  In reality, that notion of immediate impact on competitors is an overreach. While Facebook’s new Order Food capability has yet to fully mature, it does not appear to be incorporated into user feeds which would make it far more immediate and powerful. As currently deployed, the feature is not an impulse play like the many sponsored posts that appear in Facebook member feeds. Facebook hopes its habitual users will simply add food delivery to their existing list of activities as they go through their day.

More than anything, Facebook’s entry into the restaurant delivery space shines a light on one of the company’s more glaring weaknesses—its lack of a viable commerce infrastructure. On the other hand, Amazon’s new restaurant delivery service takes on all the workload from the restaurants it serves. And, by the way, Amazon has its own fleet of drivers to deliver food while Facebook is in the background with others doing the heavy lifting.

Facebook’s strategy of looking for ways to keep its users on the site longer is a throwback to the early days of web portals such as Yahoo, Lycos, Infoseek and even AOL. Those stalwarts had one or two prime draws—generally search and email—that kept folks coming back several times a day. Each of these—now mostly dormant—websites began to add new functionality which eventually made them so cluttered that they collapsed under the weight of their vision. It also is one of the reasons that Google was able to come in and eradicate the competition—it did one thing (search) and did it better than anyone else.

In the volatile world of food delivery, the winners will be those who offer restaurants a total, easy-to-use platform that allows them to focus on food, while partners such as GrubHub, UberEats, Amazon, Postmates and others take on the heavy lifting. Will Facebook be a player in this food fight? Probably not.

MasterCard Sees Bot Applications As A Way To “Go Where Consumers Are”

We know the potential for the chatbot interface to be one of the defining stories of connected living in 2017 is there. Mike has covered the variety of ways that “social messaging chatbots” will impact the smart home and of course, the smart kitchen. MasterCard isn’t new to the smart home game – you might remember that they are the financial provider backing grocery ordering on Samsung’s FamilyHub smart fridge.

They’re clearly betting on bot applications as a way to encourage the easy use of their products on the Masterpass platform. Last week at Facebook’s developer conference, MasterCard announced a chatbot for Facebook Messenger, allowing customers to order from select retail and food vendors by chatting with the AI-powered interface. Similar to the on-fridge ordering partnership on the FamilyHub, MasterCard will work with Fresh Direct for chatbot grocery needs and also announced Cheesecake Factory and Subway for takeout food services.

MasterCard has prioritized chatbot integrations, releasing its bot API to developers earlier in the year. According to their developer site, MasterCard wants to make it easy to incorporate their “digital payment technology into conversational commerce experiences.” Beyond food ordering, the platform could be used to order from any retail partner in the future – giving Facebook an easy way to compete with online commerce giants and keeping consumers on the platform longer.

Masterpass-Enabled Bots

Facebook is increasingly interested in bot technology and sees its Messenger platform as a way for brands to reinvent customer communications and e-commerce. Facebook advertising, an increasingly popular way for brands to reach consumers by taking advantage of all the data Facebook collects on its users and serving them up personalized ads. Brands that advertise and have a large presence on the platform often use Facebook Messenger to communicate with customers, sending order and shipment information after a sale and answering questions. You can envision a future where as ad served up to someone who had recently been browsing for new shoes takes them to a chatbot that can offer custom selections and complete the sale right in the interface.

The opportunities in using natural language processing and artificial intelligence to communicate with us wherever we’re used to having conversations – whether that’s via text or in different messenger apps – are huge. Since Facebook introduced the concept, over 11,000 bots have been introduced on Messenger.

Whether it’s helping consumers cook their favorite recipe, ordering food or even communicating with their home, chatbots are definitely here to stay.