Last week, Facebook released Messenger Platform 1.4 which opened up new possibilities for businesses and bot makers. Looking forward to these new features? We’ve prepared a quick rundown of our upcoming platform updates which will make these available to all Smooch users.

Coming next week

We’ve already started work on a number of features which will become available starting next week.

Carousel Image Aspect Ratio

Messenger now lets you have square images inside your carousel on top of the horizontal default.

Your designers are sure to appreciate the new, more common ratio. We’ll be adding image aspect ratio into our Post Message API

Increase the maximum of quick replies to 11

NPS score via quick replies seems a good reason to crank it up to 11. Our Reply button API will now truncate your buttons at 11 when sending to Messenger (note that our API & SDKs support infinite number of replies).

Increase text message length to 640 characters

So far, we’ve been splitting your long messages into multiple ones on Messenger to fit the previous limit of 320 characters. Our logic will now take into account the increased character limit.

Persistent Menu API update

This is one that bots will really appreciate! Messenger’s video shows best the experience you can create with this new menu. We’ll be updating our Persistent Menu API to support menu nesting on both Messenger and WeChat. Seeing how those menus are starting to shape up, we’ll also change our API to allow to configure each channel separately if needed. Disallowing the user from sending freeform messages will also be supported.

Coming later this month

Improved Webview support

Facebook is continuing it’s investment into creating a great web view experience via their Messenger Extension and a few additions to the main API.

We’ll be updating our Link button API to support specifying a Webview height ratio, enabling Messenger extension when opening a Webview as well as defining a fallback URL for Messenger clients without Messenger Extension support.

Coming next month

Customer Matching

We also started designing how we will add support for Customer Matching on Smooch. We’re very excited by customer matching because it enables you, the business, to start the conversation. Messenger is one of the first OTT channel to enable that, the same way it's already possible on SMS, Email and with our mobile and web SDKs.

With our User API, you’ll be able to add a phone number to a user’s profile and then send a message while targeting Messenger as the destination. Smooch will then attempt to match the user on Messenger using the user’s phone number and name if available. If the match is successful, the user will get your message, which will look like a message request in Messenger and Smooch will create a Messenger client for this user.

What next?

We’ll be starting to roll out the first updates in the next few days. Look out for these features in our changelog or follow us on Twitter to get our latest updates.