Facebook’s ‘M’ AI assistant has been up in the air since quite a while now. Today, the company is rolling out a set of features that will make its assistant more useful than ever. This includes the ability to pop into your conversations and render help where it deems fit. So, if you are talking about paying back some money to a friend, M will advice you to use its in-built payment service.
Announcing the new features, Facebook said:
Today we’re excited to announce the launch of suggestions from M to everyone in the US. M is your helpful assistant in Messenger, powered by artificial intelligence. M offers suggestions by popping into an open conversation to suggest relevant content and capabilities to enrich the way people communicate and get things done.
The AI deploys machine learning techniques in order to get things done and to recognize when you could do with its assistance.Together with the messenger, M could actually prove to be a very handy tool that could allow you to complete quite a lot of stuff without ever having to leave messenger at all. Like all Machine learning tools, M improves as you use it. The more you use it, the more it learns about your unique traits and personalizes itself according to them.
In case you find it to be an irritant, you can easily mute it by going into M’ settings, right when it appears near your chat for the first time.
Here are some of the ways the assistant can help you out:
- Sending stickers: M shares fun sticker suggestions for your daily life interactions like “Thank you” or “Bye-bye.”
- Paying or requesting money: M recognizes when people are discussing payments and gives them the option of easily sending or requesting money.
- Sharing your location: M can suggest an option to share your location during a conversation.
- Making plans: If people are talking about getting together, M helps coordinating a plan.
- Starting a poll (in group conversations only): Have a hard time making decisions in a group? M lets you set a poll topic and vote in group conversations.
- Getting a Ride: Talking about going somewhere? M suggests “Get A Ride” and shares an option of Lyft or Uber.
Facebook also said that it was upgrading the messenger experience so as to make it easier. For instance, the company talked about letting people attach and send videos and pictures via a simple long press on the composer. Games, Payments, Share Location and Rides would soon be easily accessible through a new More tab.
