Passive aggressively ask friends to pay you back with Facebook's new feature

Facebook Messenger has a new payments feature and it might make some of your conversations a little awkward.

The new feature being will suggest users pay their friends within a chat when "IOU" or another variation of the phrase is used.

The feature, officially called "Chat Assist," is only a test in the U.S. for now so you may not see it right away. For those who are part of the experiment though, it will automatically prompt you to pay friends within chats when it detects you might owe someone money.

Here's how Facebook explains it:

if you use the phrase 'IOU' when communicating with someone, chat assist may helpfully offer an optional link below your message that allows you to easily pay your friend back.

While it's an interesting application of Facebook's machine learning prowess -- the company is increasingly focused on artificial intelligence these days -- it could easily come off as a bit passive aggressive to randomly see unsolicited payment requests pop up in your conversations.

Elsewhere, Facebook Messenger also introduced a new polling feature that's available now to all its U.S. users.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The feature allows you to set up a quick poll within chats on Messenger and keep tabs on how your friends vote. You can find the feature under the "..." menu in the Messenger app underneath payments, location and ride requests.