Facebook has launched its new virtual assistant called "M". It comes as a feature to be found inside its Facebook Messenger app. For the moment is just rolled out for a limited number of users in the Bay Area, according to Wired. "M" is powered by both human employees of Facebook as well as artificial intelligence. The application will enable Messenger users to complete tasks such as ordering birthday flower gifts, making restaurant reservations, inquire about questions, or discovering the best places to go hiking in California.
'M' is coming as Facebook's answer to Microsoft's Cortana and Apple's Siri. The virtual personal assistant that will come inside the company's Messenger app will allow Facebook members to do much more than managing calendars and searching for questions. M will come with certain features that can actually help people complete tasks that no other competitor virtual assistants can.
'M' is trained and supervised by humans even if it is artificially intelligent. This will enable the social media network making the service so smart that Facebook says it can book restaurants, purchase items for you, deliver gifts to your loved ones, make some travel arrangements, plan your appointments and many more.
People lucky enough to be included in the small group of users testing the service, will be able to send a note to M in messenger, just in the same way they would just chat to a friend. According to Facebook, 'M' can understand queries.
David Marcus, vice president of messaging products at Facebook, declared in a blog post that this is an early step in "the journey to build M into an at-scale service". This exciting step, he added, will enable users of the Facebook Messenger to get a variety of things done for them, so they can spend more time on focusing only on what is really important in their lives.
According to Facebook, using "M" will be just as simple as beginning a conversation with the virtual assistant through the Messenger app. Unlike Siri, the virtual assistant from Apple, "M" does not have a gender, nor its users will have the possibility to know whether they are being helped by a bot or a real Facebook employee.
