What Is Apple’s Business Chat? Trademarks For New Service Surface Online

During this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), Apple introduced Business Chat to developers. The new service is mainly designed to help business owners connect with their clients in Messages. This week, the Cupertino giant filed four trademarks related to Business Chat, signalling the imminent launch of the service.

When Apple announced Business Chat, it described the service as a “powerful new way for business to connect with customers directly in Messages.” Apple said then that the service is intended to provide customers with a faster means of communicating to business companies, so that the former could get answers to their queries, resolve certain issues and complete transactions using their Apple devices.

Apple is developing Business Chat for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch devices. Hence, consumers can expect this feature to become available to any of these devices sometime next year. The beauty of the new service is it can instantly connect clients to companies from Safari, Maps, Spotlight and even Siri. This means iOS users can start a Business Chat thread with the company they find through the aforesaid apps and features.

According to Forbes, Business Chat will come in handy in many situations. For instance, users can utilize the service to schedule appointments and events, ask questions about products and even make purchases supported by Apple Pay and Apple Pay Cash. In addition, Business Chat also has expanded capabilities like selecting a seat in a concert venue or ordering food items from a restaurant’s menu.

The possibilities with Business Chat are absolutely unlimited, and it wouldn’t be a problem for Apple to lure companies to using its new service. After all, Apple’s user base is quite huge and continues to grow with every release of its new smartphones, tablets and smartwatches. The company’s iOS mobile operating system is also seeing massive changes that bring more advanced technologies.

Unfortunately, Apple has yet to announce the official release date of Business Chat. However, Patently Apple has learned this Saturday that the company filed four trademarks for the new service, strengthening rumors that Business Chat could be launched in the first half of 2018.

The four trademark applications are as follows:

• #87721768 — "Computer software; downloadable pre-recorded audio, video and multimedia content."
• #87721788 — "Business consulting services; advertising, marketing, and promotion services; advertising and marketing consultation; creating indexes of information, sites and other resources available on global computer networks and other electronic and communications networks for others; providing, searching, browsing and retrieving information, sites, and other resources available on global computer networks and other electronic and communications networks for others; organizing content of information provided over a global computer network and other electronic and communications networks according to user preferences; providing business, consumer, and commercial information over computer networks and global communication networks."
• #87721797 — "Telecommunication services; transmission of data and of information by electronic means; delivery of messages by electronic transmission"
• #87721802 — "Provision of Internet search engine services; design and development of computer hardware and software"