Facebook has announced that they are looking to get in on the digital personal assistant game and are testing a service called “M.” The service will be a part of the Facebook Messenger and will be able to answer questions, provide recommendations, make plans and much more. It is clearly meant to compete with Apple’s Siri, Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana.
Of course, Facebook says that “M” will be taking this type of technology to a whole new level for their users. First, they say it will be able to actually complete important tasks for users. The VP of messaging products, David Marcus, said, “Unlike other AI-based services in the market, M can actually complete tasks on your behalf. It can purchase items, get gifts delivered to your loved ones, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments and way more.”
How the completion of tasks will work has not been revealed but with the recent addition of payment options into messenger, it seems that it shouldn’t be too difficult. Another perk of M is that it will have a team of actual humans on the backend actively working to ensure things run smoothly (and undoubtedly improve the M service in the process). If you ask M to do something that it can’t currently do, the humans may be able to complete the task. This will most likely be popular with things like answering questions, which the humans can then update M’s abilities.
The tool is already being tested with live users (located in the Bay Area) and is planned for a future rollout to all Messenger users.
