Update: Facebook now wants you to ditch using apps - and speaking to humans altogether. Last night at the company's F8 conference in America, founder Mark Zuckerberg unveiled his plans for Messenger "bots" as a way for us to directly communicate with businesses, news outlets and services in a more personal way. Or at least, the AIs the businesses build to answer you.
Don't get us wrong, in principle it sounds like there are quite a few advantages to these new bots: they will be able to answer questions, take orders (or, we imagine, process money transfers), and ask further questions to clarify what you might need - all in real time.
As an example, Zuckerberg highlighted two potential companies we could interact with - CNN and the American version of Interflora, 1-800 Flowers - and demonstrated how a user could simply type into messenger to find out more about a certain news subject or order a bouquet for a loved one in a few simple button taps.
In fact, this announcement combined with the fact that messenger apps now have more users combined than socail media platforms - has already lead a few tech experts, most notably Chris Messina at Medium, to dub 2016 the year of conversational commerce. Facebook is clearly anticipating this to be the next big thing in tech too - earlier in the year the company got rid of the 59p price tag for its other messenger service WhatsApp (currently clocking 900 million users worldwide).
However, this all begs the question: what is the end game? Theoretically there is the possibility that this would be a quicker than hanging on the telephone to pay your gas bill or get tickets to Adele, but is this really any quicker than, you know, using an app? And even if it is, is this not making those already impersonal calls to a call centre on the other side of the world to get a refund on your overcharged mobile bill even more impersonal - and frustratingly imprecise, if Siri's current AI is anything to go by?
And, when it comes to news, are we really at a place yet where we'd trust a faceless bot to curate which articles we should or shouldn't read? Or process our bank transactions via voice command.
Call us cynical, but we'll stick with human interaction for the time being...