It won’t be able to do your dishes! However, Facebook’s ‘M’ will definitely be a great addition to the current Messenger app. Like Microsoft’s Cortana in Windows 10, Facebook’s ‘M’ shall help you make decisions followed by prompt actions like making a purchase or reserving a table in a restaurant, right from your messenger app.
We have heard about interest-based advertising previously. This is an extended form, where you have the independence and option to take actions based on your choices right from your Messenger app. This is done by utilizing the data you share with the applications. The algorithms try to figure out the pattern of your actions to help you implementing your choices. For eg. when we see a new model of a mobile phone, we might just want to know more about it and find out its price. ‘M’ in this case can help us with both, without needing us to search the web.
Facebook’s Messenger app lead David Marcus spoke a little bit about the new plans –
Today we’re beginning to test a new service called 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.
The Facebook Messenger’s ‘M’ personal assistant puts the company in competition with Apple’s Siri, Google’s Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana.
