A bot would appear in the app just like a friend.

“We aren’t just trying to do question and response bots like you see elsewhere, but to have a rich interactive experience inside of threads,” Marcus told the Telegraph.

This includes shopping, booking airline tickets and even reading the news.

For instance, Marcus demonstrated the CNN News Bot for those who want little snippets of news in Messenger.

You can tell the CNN Bot what you’re interested in so it can tailor topics that are sent to you, and scroll through a carousel of different news stories. You can also ask it for a specific summary of a story.

Marcus also mentioned the shopping concierge bot built by e-commerce site Spring.

The bot asks you what you’re looking to buy – you can just text it if you want to, or click on the buttons – say you pick shoes, you can input price, and you get a range of curated products that you can scroll horizontally.

“It’s completely automated. People at the Facebook office here have been playing it here for the last couple of days, spending way too much money on it,” Marcus said.

The bots will learn your preferences

Facebook hopes to build machine learning into these bots so they learn your preferences over time – what types of items you like to buy, what news stories you prefer and so on.

This rich data is a goldmine for a service like Facebook which is sustained by advertising. “We are testing if business bots can re-engage people on threads with sponsored messages, it’s a small tiny test,” Marcus said.

In other words, Facebook may ultimately let brands contact you independently through Messenger, if they think you may be persuaded – a whole new era of targeted advertising.

Facebook’s AI assistant ‘M’ will also get bots

Facebook is testing its artificially intelligent secretary, called M, within its Messenger app in the US which uses a combination of human labour and machine learning to complete tasks for you. It can purchase items, get gifts delivered, book restaurants, and make travel arrangements.

“We are opening a new ‘bot builder’ so developers around the world can build bots for M,” Marcus said. This means if you wanted your assistant M to give you a weather alert and traffic summary before your commute every day, it would. “We could build an automated bot for that that learned over time,” he said.