David Marcus, Vice President of Messaging Products at Facebook, revealed on Wednesday that America’s number-one social network is currently developing a genderless virtual personal assistant called “M.” This new AI will be located within Messenger, the company’s stand-alone chat client. So far there’s no indication when—or if—this virtual assistant will be released to the Facebook masses.
What will make this AI different from Google Now, Siri, and Cortana is that M will actually complete tasks. “It can purchase items, get gifts delivered to your loved ones, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments, and way more,” Marcus said in a blog.
Unfortunately, Marcus doesn’t go into great detail regarding M, pointing out that the virtual assistant is in its early stages. However, he provided several screenshots revealing that M can help order flowers for the user’s mother, locate a “dog friendly” beach nearby, suggest shoes for a newborn baby, suggest a good burger joint for a trip that will be taken next week, and so on.
Marcus says that M is powered by “artificial intelligence that's trained and supervised by people.” He goes on to tell Wired that M is a hybrid personal assistant: it has an AI as well as a human team located at Facebook. These “M Trainers” will make sure that all requests made by users will be answered, whether it’s by the AI or the human team. Users will have no idea if their question was answered by the AI or a human.
According to Wired, M does not pull information for Facebook’s huge stash of social data. Thus, if a human asks M about what type of gift to give Mom, the service will make a suggestion based on answers to additional questions and previous conversations. The best part about Facebook’s virtual assistant is that it will be completely free to Facebook users.
If that’s the case, how will Facebook make money from M? “We start capturing all of your intent for the things you want to do,” Marcus says. “Intent often leads to buying something, or to a transaction, and that’s an opportunity for us to [make money] over time.”
Naturally, Facebook will potentially make loads of money if and when the user base increases. An increase in revenue means more investment into the project, which in turn will generate more revenue for the social network. One notable drawback to M is that users will have to open Messenger on their mobile device in order to access it. Perhaps the virtual assistant will be a stand-alone app in the future.
The report states that M has been in use by a group of Facebook employees over the last several weeks. One Facebook employee even had M call the cable company and wait for a service representative. The wait was presumably a long (long) time and was actually endured by a Facebook employee instead of the AI.
Currently, over 700 million Facebook members are using the Messenger app. Now, imagine the number of questions M and its human team could receive once the service goes public. Hopefully, Facebook will have plenty of M Trainers on hand.
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1hg4YW7
