![]() They include WeChat and Line, which have been offering business account options since 20, respectively. Public Accounts puts Viber among several other consumer-focused messaging apps that have already started to court brands and others with special features to “speak” to those apps’ user bases. Public Accounts, Smilov pointed out, will be the first time that you (and a business) will be able to interact with each other without having each other as a contact. Public Accounts - which Shmilov formally announced today at at the Web Summit in Lisbon - are building on a feature that Viber added back in 2014 called “ Public Chats.” This essentially let personalities - or anyone, really - run a conversation with the public, although only those who actually had the speaker as an actual contact were able to interact with him or her. “We provide the tools for bot developers. ![]() “We are focused on building the best chat experience with a scalable API, so we are not building bots ourselves,” he said. ![]() Public Accounts will also open the door to Viber hosting bots as well - although Viber itself will not be building these, Shmilov tells me. Businesses can then send and read their Viber messages alongside all of their other social media, email and messaging interactions. Michael Shmilov, COO of Viber, told me in an interview that by the end of November, Viber’s API will be integrated with between 10 and 15 popular CRM packages. The customer service component, meanwhile, will be coming soon. There are some 1,000 Public Accounts that are debuting at launch, including accounts for The Huffington Post, Yandex and The Weather Channel, to send out updates and other information to users who choose to subscribe to them. Today, Viber is launching Public Accounts, a new account format for businesses and brands who want to communicate with Viber users for marketing, customer service - or a bit of both, without a user needing to add that account as a contact first. Viber, the messaging app with 800 million users owned by Japan’s Rakuten, is today taking the next step in expanding its platform as it seeks to compete against the likes of Facebook’s Messenger and WhatsApp not just for audience - but revenues.
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