F8 Refresh is over, all the Facebook product updates you want to know about are here

On June 3rd, the F8 Refresh Developer Conference was held in the form of a virtual meeting. After a pause in the past year, this conference chose to return to its original intentions and refocus on the developer community.

As always, at this conference, Facebook showcased the latest product innovations. The difference is that F8 Refresh did not release any hardware products, but returned its attention to the developers. Facebook hopes to make F8 return to its roots and become a real developer conference. Its ultimate goal is help developers find innovative solutions to connect with customers.

These solutions start with more open APIs, new developer platforms, AR creator tools, and technical tools.

More open API, efficient communication through messages

Facebook's vision is to make messaging the main method of communication between customers and businesses.

At F8 in 2016, Facebook took the first step towards this vision and released the Messenger platform in the form of an open API. On F8 this year, Facebook has achieved a greater degree of openness: opens Messenger AP for Instagram I for all developers. Developers can use this API to help brands communicate with customers on Instagram.

In the ten years since its birth, Instagram has become more than just a cultural and social center, but also a platform for users to discover and connect with brands. According to Facebook, 90% of Instagram users currently follow at least one brand, and instant messaging is a key factor contributing to this phenomenon. Last year, on Facebook and Instagram, the number of people using Messenger to communicate with companies rose by 40%.

The opening of the Instagram Messenger API will help developers better improve the communication between brands and customers, and make communication faster and more efficient.

In addition, this conference also released the latest update of the WhatsApp Business API.

As the world's largest instant messaging software, WhatsApp has more than 2 billion global active users, covering 180 countries, and more than 500 million daily active users. It is also an important channel for brands to expand customers: Every day, more than 175 million users send messages to WhatsApp Business business accounts, inquire about products or obtain customer support.

In order to help companies get started with WhatsApp Business API more easily and allow users to chat with companies more freely, WhatsApp Business API has made three important updates:

● Get started faster : Reduce the entry process from a few weeks to just five minutes, shortening the entry time for enterprises to use the WhatsApp Business API.

● Get more information from companies : People want to receive more information on WhatsApp, so the WhatsApp Business API actively improves the way companies communicate with customers, and will support more types of messages, such as notifications when products are restocked user.

● new message function : WhatsApp Business API is about to launch a new message function, so that customers can respond to the company in a new way, so as to achieve faster transactions. These features include quick message lists (customers can reply without typing) and reply buttons (customers can quickly click to select).

In addition to the opening and updating of the API, Facebook also announced a new feature-Facebook and Messenger linked login.

Facebook login makes it easier for billions of users around the world to log in to corporate applications and websites. After establishing an association with Messenger and logging in, customers can log in to Messenger directly with their Facebook account, and communicate directly with the company through Messenger.

In the test brand of this function, more than 70% of brand users will choose to activate the Messenger communication process. With this important channel for dialogue with customers, companies can provide more personalized and effective customer service, and enhance interaction with customers through Messenger.

It is understood that this feature is currently in the beta stage and will be released publicly in the next few months.

new developer platform, Facebook Business Extension, to create

Last year, Facebook launched the Business Suite to facilitate companies to use the integrated platform to simultaneously manage activities on Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.

At the F8 Refresh conference, Facebook announced that it will launch Business Apps and add third-party tools built by developers to Facebook Business Suite.

In addition, in order to help developers integrate enterprise applications and demonstrate the Facebook Business Suite, Facebook launched a new developer platform --Facebook Business Extension.

Facebook said that in the next few months, it will invite the developer community to experience it first, and then continue to increase its applications in the ecosystem.

Spark AR-Powering the global AR creator community

In F8 in 2017, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained AR in more than 40 minutes. From the Camera Effects open platform to the two tools AR Frame and AR Studio, he greatly expressed his confidence in the future development of AR. .

Among them, Spark AR Studio is used to help everyone design and deploy AR special effects in Facebook applications and devices. It has become the world's largest mobile AR platform, with more than 600,000 creators from 190 countries/regions on Facebook and Instagram More than 2 million AR special effects have been released.

In the past few years, the Spark team has added new features to improve the visual fidelity of mobile AR. The latest features include updates to target tracking and segmentation.

At the F8 Refresh Developer Conference, Spark AR went on to show off the latest Multipeer API. Based on this API, for the first time, creators will provide special effects between multiple call participants at the same time to achieve a coordinated experience. For example, design a special effect to make all call participants feel that they are in the same space, such as happy interaction in space or around a campfire, and even support lightweight games.

This new feature opens up new possibilities for creators and developers to help them build AR experiences for video calls on Messenger, Instagram, and Portal.

Currently, Spark AR's AR video call public beta version is now open for application. Application address: https://go.facebookinc.com/sparkAR-beta-video-calling.html.

PyTorch-ideal for AI framework

When it comes to machine learning frameworks, we cannot fail to mention the PyTorch framework developed by Facebook in 2016. Although young, PyTorch has won a large number of users in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and it is close to TensorFlow in many indicators.

However, Facebook is not satisfied with this.

At the F8 Refresh Developer Conference, Facebook announced that it would make PyTorch the default framework for the company to build all AI and machine learning models.

PyTorch not only makes our research and engineering work more effective, coordinated and efficient, but also allows us to share our work in the form of an open source PyTorch library and learn from the progress made by thousands of PyTorch developers around the world . Whether you are a novice developer or an experienced AI expert, PyTorch can help you, and getting started with this framework is easier than ever.

The company said that by migrating all AI systems to PyTorch, they will be able to achieve faster innovation while ensuring a better experience for all users. Currently, 93% of Facebook AI models are deployed on the PyTorch framework.

As a social media giant, Facebook has launched a series of updates around Messenger aimed at enhancing communication functions, especially corporate communications. And more open APIs, a new developer platform Facebook Business Extension, AI framework PyTorch, a series of technological innovations show that Facebook attaches great importance to the developer community, and truly practice the theme of "building together and growing together".

If you missed the live broadcast, you can click https://reachtheworldonfacebook.com/m/f8/agenda to watch F8 Refresh on-demand video.

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