Furthering Facebook’s quest to manage every aspect of your life from remembering acquaintances’ birthdays right down to comparing your relative life success against the rest of your high school graduating class, they’re now joining Siri, Cortana, and Google Now in the realm of AI assistants. Meet M, whose company you will undoubtedly enjoy for the 20 minutes it takes you to realize Googling things is still easier.
But unlike other AI assistants you may already have grown tired of know, M can actually do things for you, according to Facebook. Because if there’s one thing AI really needed to make us feel secure, it was the ability to act autonomously.
Also unlike the competition, M works via text message instead of voice commands—or more accurately, Facebook message, but we all know messaging apps are going to replace text messages anyway, right? Well, unless you’re one of the people for whom they already have, that is. I know I vastly prefer typing messages 90% of the time over having to speak with my biological human mouth (yuck), so this move only makes sense.
Facebook’s David Marcus described the launch of M:
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.
Hopefully that human intervention will prevent M from deciding a bag of dog poop is an appropriate gift for your loved one if you’re spending too much time with them instead of talking to it. And since this is still the early days, I have a feature request: make M the unequivocal lord of text-based RPG game masters. Please, Facebook? “You see an argument brewing on the Internet. Engage? Y/N.”
(via TechCrunch)
—Please make note of The Mary Sue’s general comment policy.—
Do you follow The Mary Sue on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, & Google +?
