Facebook is planning to bring M at your service. Don't get your hopes up too high, since M in no way resembles the character from the popular James Bond films, who commands different sections of the British Intelligence.
The Facebook M functions as a personal digital assistant integrated with its popular Messenger app. And it will sit on top of other digital assistants if it can deliver the promised technology.
"M is a personal digital assistant inside of Messenger that completes tasks and finds information on your behalf. It's powered by artificial intelligence trained and supervised by people," Facebook's vice president of messaging products David Marcus, explained in a Facebook post.
M's use of artificial intelligence (AI) and actual people's input will gain an edge over other digital assistants such as Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. While Apple, Microsoft and even Google run their digital assistants entirely based on AI, Facebook has employed new hires, dubbed as M trainers, to answer complex questions.
According to Wired, M can carry out requests such as hotel reservations, gifting ideas, suggest and book weekend getaways, travel arrangements, purchase items and a lot more. M is designed to work just like your usual messages in Messenger. When a user posts a question to M, it decodes the natural language and gets into the depth of the matter by asking follow-up questions.
M has been under testing by several employees of the company for weeks now. The service has been used to carry out simplest and time-consuming tasks such as contacting your service providers to setup or troubleshoot your Wi-Fi.
Facebook hasn't revealed when M will be available for use, but it will be available for more than 700 million users of Messenger app eventually.
"This is early in the journey to build M into an at-scale service. But it's an exciting step towards enabling people on Messenger to get things done across a variety of things, so they can get more time to focus on what's important in their lives," Marcus noted.
