You can now talk to President Obama using Facebook Messenger

Email is sooo 2015.

Starting Wednesday, you’ll have a new way to get all of your most important and urgent messages to President Barack Obama — Facebook Messenger, the company’s standalone messaging app.

The White House published a blog post Wednesday saying that POTUS, who famously reads ten letters from U.S. citizens every day, will add Facebook messages to the pile of physical and digital mail his aides sift through. All you have to do is send your message to the new White House messaging bot.

“Our goal is to meet people where they are,” the post reads, highlighting Obama’s Twitter account and the First Lady’s Snapchat account as other examples of the White House going digital.

Yes, reaching POTUS via Messenger feels like a bit like a gimmick. There are lots of other ways you can send messages to the President, of course, including email. But the move is also proof that messaging is indeed the communication method of the future, as anyone with a smartphone can likely already attest. The White House getting on board is certainly a sign of that.

And it’s not a bad publicity stunt for Facebook and its new push into messaging bots, either. Here’s the White House account where you can send Obama a message.

Facebook

In order to submit your question, though, the bot does ask for lots of personal info, including your address and phone number. A quick test run through the process serves as a great reminder that bots and the machine learning technology that’s used to understand your messages is still a work in progress...

Facebook

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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