COMMERCE TECH

Facebook ‘M’ makes Messenger your personal assistant

Back in 2015, Facebook was testing its digital assistant codenamed Moneypenny. Facebook called it a new service inside Messenger that would complete tasks and look for information on your behalf. On April 6, Facebook announced the launch of suggestions from M in a blog.

Facebook has been training, supervising and testing Suggestions from M with a small percentage of users for the past few months. And now M’s AI (machine learning, to be precise) abilities have been expanded to hit both iOS and Android and to all Messenger users in the US. M will offer helpful suggestions during conversations with friends to suggest relevant content and capabilities to enrich the way people communicate and get things done. This digital assistant for Messenger app will eventually be rolled out to other countries.

Facebook has started with some particular actions that will be supported by M. You can share your exact location with a friend during a conversation to help finalize a plan. Payment to a friend gets easier with M offering payment options. M makes suggestions relevant to various actions in a personal or a group chat, such as sending stickers, ride sharing, starting a poll amongst others. The suggestion appears with M’s logo. All these and more will let people get things done and help them communicate in a better way. More the people use it, more M will learn.

In future, Messenger might become the go-to place to get various tasks done. Facebook has promised this is the beginning, saying M’s predictive powers will only get bigger from here. How BIG, bigger is, will be known in the time to come.