Charlie Warzel, writing for BuzzFeed News, takes us on a tour of M, the Facebook Messenger based digital assistant that behaves like there’s a human on the other side of the conversation:
In late March, Facebook gave the world a peek at its grand ambition: to use the Messenger platform to effectively become the internet. Yesterday evening, thanks to a test rollout of the company’s virtual personal assistant program, M, some of us were treated to a glimpse of how that process is likely going to go down. Late last night, M popped up in my co-worker’s Messenger app, and, within moments, started behaving exactly like, well, a real human being.
It worked seamlessly, drawing information from other platforms like Yelp. It booked flights (M seems really good at helping you spend your money), explained how to use Snapchat, and recognized articles my colleague had written. It was a little stiff, perhaps, but an effective researcher and a reasonable conversation partner. As my colleague’s screengrabs spread around the internet, watching people tweet about it began to feel almost surreal — a bit Skynet-y. One Twitter user said that M helped him lower his Comcast bill.
M reminds me of invisible boyfriend. How much of M is AI and how much human?
From Wired’s first look at M:
Built atop Facebook Messenger—the company’s instant messaging app—M made its debut this morning, arriving on the phones of a few hundred unsuspecting souls in the San Francisco Bay Area. Yes, it’s the company’s answer to Siri and similar services like Google Now and Microsoft Cortana. But it tackles a broader range of tasks, at least as Facebook describes it. You can ask M questions along the lines of Can you make me dinner reservations? or even Can you help me plan my next vacation?—and it will comply.
And:
If you want a system to automatically identify cats in YouTube videos, humans must first show it what a cat looks like. They must tag all sorts of feline photos. They must provide data. Through the human staff backing M, Facebook is doing this type of thing in unusually complex ways. “This is why we have this big team of people,” Lebrun says. “The data we need is nonexistent.”
Makes me wonder if Apple is exploring a human-assist version of Siri.