Facebook Messenger chief admits bot launch was 'overhyped'

Chatbots were oversold and not that great when they first launched earlier this year, Facebook Messenger VP David A. Marcus told Techrunch's Disrupt conference. "The problem was that it got really overhyped very, very quickly," he said. "And the basic qualities we provided at that time weren't good enough to replace traditional apps." The problems, he added, are typical with the growing pains for any ecosystem. It didn't help that Facebook gave developers a very limited amount of time (just two weeks) to develop the first bots before they debuted at the F8 developer conference in April.