Facebook today revealed their own Personal Assistant called ‘M’. It will assist you in day to day tasks such as shopping tips, hotel or restaurants reservation, etc inside the messenger. Probably Facebook rolled out the ‘M’ to compete with industry’s other popular assistants including Google Now, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana.
What makes Facebook M completely different from all those names is, M is not powered with just technology but also by the Real People like you and me. What does that means?
Facebook has given access of M to few hundred users in the Bay Area who can send requests to messengers directly with a tap to new button. When somebody asks something to ‘M’, possibly it is some human being (or technology sometimes) completes the request by answering the question or feedback.
People will not know if it was technology or the human answered their request. Sounds interesting, isn’t it. As of now, Facebook M is only text based unlike Siri, Cortana or Google Now that supports voice assistance as well. Here is what David Marcus from Facebook has to say about ‘M’:
M is a personal digital assistant inside of Messenger that completes tasks and finds information on your behalf. It’s powered by artificial intelligence that’s trained and supervised by people.
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.
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.
