Facebook has announced that it is working on a Virtual Assistant which will be integrated in inside its Messenger app. The name of Facebook’s virtual assistant is “M”. M will do tasks on your behalf, so you can just delegate important things like sending important messages, booking flights and hotels, sending online gifts, emailing and much more to M and it will take care of the rest.
Facebook is trying to come at par with Apple and Google, Microsoft, which have their own virtual assistant apps and software. M will be artificially intelligent software which is trained and handled by real people at the back-end.
In an announcement about Facebook’s virtual assistant app M, Facebook Messenger lead David Marcus said that unlike other virtual assistants out there, M will let you control your tech realm in the easiest way possible.
The best part about Facebook M is that you can interact with it by typing a message in the messenger app. This is useful, and a huge relief for those users who don’t want to give commands to the VA with voice. Most of the users will prefer quickly writing a command in M. Famous virtual assistants like Siri and Cortana work on voice based commands, which sometimes become a hassle and nuisance.
So you can just quickly ask M about hotel, cuisine recommendation; you can ask M to do a quick search and recommend the best coffee in town; gift and dress recommendations for a party you are anxious about.
Facebook acquired Wi.ai, an artificial intelligence based startup which is working on a human element in the AI realm in order to customize and design software and systems for targeted groups. Facebook’s executive categorically identified M as a human-interaction based artificial intelligent systems, unlike other virtual assistants which use user data.
Facebook’s virtual assistant M rollout will be slow. The announcement didn’t mention that exact date of the launch of M but we can safely say that M will start rolling out slowly for Messenger users by the end of this year.
Images: TechCrunch
