Viber adds Chat Extensions for YouTube, Spotify, Booking, GIPHY, and more - get it all done within the chat
Viber is one of the world’s leading messaging apps and a great alternative to other established messengers like Skype. The latest update to the app sees its Chat Extensions feature completely revamped, letting you access the services of YouTube, Spotify, Booking.com, VICE Media, GIPHY, Guggy, and Getty Images all within Viber, never having to leave a conversation.
The feature is gradually being rolled out on Android and iOS, starting today. The YouTube chat extension lets users search, share and even play YouTube videos without leaving their conversations. Spotify’s new chat extension allows access to your favorite music and to share it inside a chat. VICE is currently preparing its own extension for delivery of news, culture, food, fashion, music, sports, tech and other original content.
The Booking.com chat extension enables Viber users to browse hotel options and share them with their travel partners inside the chat, which is going to make coordination quiet a bit easier. And as for GIPHY, Guggy, and Getty Images, these websites and their extensions have a vast collection of images, both static and moving, ready to spice up any conversation in need of a little shake-up.
Viber's Chat Extensions API is open to interested content and service providers, which will be able to build their own similar chat extensions. So, depending on how Viber handles its partnerships, there might be plenty more where these came from!
With this update, we think Viber has brought a very meaningful, practical improvement to the chat experience that won't end up unnoticed by users. The company's goal to eliminate the "agonizing back-and-forth" – as put by CEO Djamel Agaoua – between the chat and online content sources, such as websites or other apps, might just have been accomplished. After this step, Agaoua envisions Viber's future as "a platform that will house all services a user might need on a daily basis.”
While this sounds quite ambitious, it's not at all impossible – imagine your food delivery, grocery store, or anything else you regularly interact with having its own chat extension and being ready to go while you are chatting. It's not far from becoming a practical reality. Besides, most of the bigger messaging apps grow all the more "inclusive" with each major update, letting you do things you'd normally have to open a browser or another app for.
The chat extensions and bots we have now are a small glimpse of messengers' collective future, which will eventually involve ways to connect beyond chatting, video, and telecommunication.
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