Some Bay Area residents get to see the features.
By Raif Karerat
Follow @ambazaarmag
In order to compete with the likes of Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, Facebook is launching its own personal assistant, called M, and has demoed it to a few hundred Bay Area Facebook users as of Thursday.
“M is a personal digital assistant inside of Messenger that completes tasks and finds information on your behalf,” David Marcus, head of Messenger at Facebook, stated in a blog post. “”It’s powered by artificial intelligence that’s trained and supervised by people.”
M differentiates itself from other AI-based platforms by being able to 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,” said Marcus.
You use M by tapping the icon within Messenger asking questions, reported Wired. You’ll be answered by either AI or a real person — and you won’t necessarily know which one. It can also be a combination of both, with a human stepping in to complete more complicated tasks that AI might not be able to handle.
According to Wired, one of M’s most popular requests from its Facebook employee testers: the service can call your cable company and endure the endless hold times and automated messages to help you manage your phone bill or cancel your cable subscription.
Marcus anticipates that M will expand slowly over time, but that it will eventually reach everyone. As this happens, the plethora of tasks it’s performs will certainly expand.