Taking a page from 007, Facebook today introduced 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.
The most interesting part to me is the human supervision1 on top of the software.
The world of AI driven personal assistants is definitely the new Holy Grail for any software companies nowadays. So far probably the best and most successful example is Amazon’s Alexa by means of Echo. Despite everything, that system is still quite limited in functionalities and cannot make decisions on itself.
The Facebook approach instead seems to have a much broader scope in principle and looks like a real-life personal assistant. On top of that consider the amount of information that Facebook already holds on us. M probably will know you better than you mum.
- Cue the screams of horror from the privacy advocates. ↩