In the future, the
world’s largest tech companies, like Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, want
to make completing everyday chores as simple as asking a question of a
digital assistant.
Now add Facebook to that list.
The social network
announced on Wednesday that it is testing a new service called M, an
artificially intelligent digital assistant that helps a person do simple
tasks, like ordering flowers or making reservations at a restaurant.
The service will live inside Facebook Messenger, the company’s popular
communication app used by more than 700 million people; users text or
dictate questions to M, which can respond accordingly and, in some
cases, offer items to purchase or recommend places to go.
Facebook’s service
arrives in the increasingly crowded — though still nascent — field of
digital assistants, each with a different spin on how customers interact
with the services they offer. Siri, Apple’s voice-controlled assistant,
is integrated into the iPhone and responds to verbal commands and
requests. Google Now uses algorithms to deliver information you may need
throughout the day (think weather alerts or traffic updates). Cortana
from Microsoft and Echo from Amazon can do much the same thing.
In the meantime,
start-ups like Operator or Magic are taking a human-powered approach
with their apps, fulfilling requests from users with real live customer
service representatives. Facebook’s approach is a hybrid of the two,
using algorithms as well as paid employees to train M into delivering
more intelligent results.
For now, M is
available only to a small test group of people. But Facebook’s ultimate
ambitions, like other tech companies, are much broader.
“This is early in the
journey to build M into an at-scale service,” David Marcus, Facebook’s
vice president of messaging products, wrote in a Facebook post
on Wednesday. “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.
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