“Facebook Inc is testing a personal digital assistant called ‘M’ within its Messenger service that can answer questions with live human help and perform tasks such as buying gifts online and booking restaurants,” Yasmeen Abutaleb reports for Reuters.
“M is ‘powered by artificial intelligence that’s trained and supervised by people,’ David Marcus, vice president of Messaging products, wrote on his Facebook page on Wednesday,” Abutaleb reports. “Rival services like Apple Inc’s Siri, Google Inc’s Google Now and Microsoft Corp’s Cortana rely entirely on technology to answer questions.”
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.
This is early in the journey to build M into an at-scale service. 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. — Facebook’s David Marcus
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: So, who are these people who know about your travel arrangements, your loved ones’ gifts, your appointments, etc.? And with whom, or what, are they sharing that information?
No thanks.
Seems like a service that unthinking fragmandroid settlers would embrace with “open” arms, given their willingness to hand over their privacy at the drop of a hat. Unless Facebook plans to charge for it and then the fragmandroiders will be out, as usual.
SEE ALSO:
Google, Facebook, Dell, HP, others take Samsung’s side in Apple patent fight – July 21, 2015
FYI: Facebook collects all the text you typed but decided against posting – April 22, 2015
European Commission: Don’t use Facebook if you don’t want to be spied on – March 27, 2015
Facebook, Google, and Amazon are getting even creepier – December 9, 2014
Edward Snowden’s privacy tips: ‘Get rid of Dropbox,” avoid Facebook and Google – October 13, 2014
Tim Berners-Lee: You should own your personal data, not Google, Facebook, Amazon, and advertisers – October 8, 2014
How to hide Twitter, Facebook buttons in iOS 8 sharing panel – October 2, 2014
Facebook’s scary Messenger app highlights iOS security vs. Android security – August 8, 2014
Facebook conducts massive psychology experiment on 700,000 unaware users, and you may have been a guinea pig – June 28, 2014
Why Apple really values your privacy – unlike Google, Facebook, or Amazon – June 25, 2014
U.S. NSA used Facebook to hack into computers – March 12, 2014
How to permanently delete your Facebook account – December 16, 2013
My first thought was “Awesome!”
Siri’s mistakes could easily be fixed by a person watching (like how Siri can’t understand the name Ian: “Call Ian.” ~Call EN). And lots of places already know my gift preferences and relatives addresses.
That said, it’s the Google problem: scale. MDN is right, I don’t want one source knowing all that stuff.
My guess is that Siri’s moving slow (e.g. Not yet on OSX) because there’s a lot of backend to be written and creative problem solving to be done to allow a powerful Siri that also provides powerful privacy protections.
Good luck getting me to use it, since there’s no way I am installing Facebook Messenger. I have no idea why they had to pull messaging out of the main app.
Bandwidth. The main facebook app allegedly loads faster now.
Looks like the ONLY purpose of M is to decide how to spend your money . . . and then keep a record of it.
‘So, who are these people who know about your travel arrangements, your loved ones’ gifts, your appointments, etc.? And with whom, or what, are they sharing that information?’
By the sound of it Mi6. My personal preference would have been for Q to supervise it rather than M, after all Im sure he has a licence to kill.