![]() ![]() The chat extensions work by way of the button at the bottom of the screen: when you want to, say, provide some info on Strepsirrhini in Wikipedia, you would write strepsirrhini” and a short version of the entry will come up. “Pushing more and more things is not the agenda for us.” “The challenge here is not just to run and copy everything from others but to look at what we can build for our users, the right things for Viber users to enrich their experience,” he said. And partly it is because Viber is trying to be selective in what it does. The reason for this, Shmilov said, was partly because of the encryption that they have built into that app - it’s not that easy to simply integrate services into that. It will be interesting to see if it proves more popular than Viber’s existing Facetime-like video calling feature, which he said only accounts for about 10% of all calls on the platform these days.Īs for the chat extensions, Viber is taking a measured approach by launching only a few at first, and essentially building the extensions themselves or working closely with the third-party developers to do so. ![]() Shmilov said that Viber expects that the video messaging feature will get used in long conversations, or in cases where it’s less convenient to type a message. You press and hold down the video camera icon, record yourself and let it go to send it, or slide it to cancel the whole thing, as in the video below:īy comparison, sending a video message on Facebook or WhatsApp requires a couple of the following steps, depending on the app: selecting images or video, turning the camera around to make a selfie, recording the actual video, and then selecting who to send it to. In the case of video messaging, Viber has created it as a standalone service that you access directly from the messaging screen: it appears alongside the paper aeroplane icon that you press to send a text message. And Slack’s Slash Commands have proven so popular in the workplace that it has started to feel like something is missing from your collaboration tool of choice if you can’t call in information from third-party services as easily as you can on Slack.īut there are a few advantages to Viber’s implementations of these, which Viber hopes will be enough to keep current users from migrating away, and those who download the app to keep using it. Facebook was early to launch ( growing pains and all) and has continued to evolve these. Today, there are already ways for people on Messenger, WhatsApp and the rest to send asynchronous video messages - and that’s without considering the fact that you could also use old-school carrier-based MMS on your phone (the app equivalent remains more attractive because it doesn’t charge you based on the geography that is being travelled).Īnd the same goes for information bots. You could argue that these latest additions of video messaging and chat extensions, however, are examples of how Viber is, in this case at least, trying to keep up. ![]() The new edition comes as Viber - which has over 800 million registered users and around 260 million active users - continues to look for ways to compete with and differentiate itself from a sea of other messaging services that include not just Messenger and Kik, but WhatsApp (also part of the Facebook stable), WeChat, Line and many more. Viber’s COO Michael Shmilov said that the app updates for iOS and Android should be live any day now as they make they way through the approval phase. The feature is coming out in a new version of the app that will also include Chat Extensions - Viber’s equivalent of chat bots or Slack’s Slash Commands - which will let people call in information from external services - starting first with six apps, including Giphy, Wikipedia, and TheMovieDB - into their ongoing chats with contacts as well as a wider refresh of all of the app’s iconography. ![]() On the heels of Kik and Facebook’s Messenger adding in new video features yesterday, one of their old rivals Viber is announcing a new video tool of its own: users can now use Viber to send each other videos as messages with the push of a button - the messaging app video equivalent of push-to-talk. ![]()
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