Facebook on Wednesday announced a new service called M, a personal digital assistant that resides inside its
Messenger app. Much like
Cortana,
Google Now and
Siri, M is designed to make life a bit easier but the social network’s assistant takes things a step further with some human help.
David Marcus, Facebook's vice president of messaging products,
announced the new service earlier today in a post on his Facebook page. In it, he said M is powered by artificial intelligence that is trained and supervised by people.
Unlike other AI-based assistants already available, M is capable of actually completing tasks on your behalf. Examples Marcus mentioned include purchasing items online, having gifts delivered to loved ones, making travel arrangements, booking reservations at a restaurant and setting up appointments.
Facebook product designer Jeremy Goldberg
said M is an effort to partner human and machine intelligence to create meaningful experiences. Over time, M will gain “automation superpowers” that’ll help the company expand its capabilities, make it faster and scale it to more end-users.
