The move is seen as the first step in a broader launch of the digital assistant to compete against services from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Samsung, which is launching its new assistant with its newest smartphone.
The power of M’s AI technology to support and enhance the Messenger experience and make it more useful, personal and seamless.
With M, Facebook Messenger users can simplify tasks such as sending money to friends, sharing location or obtaining a ride-share.
They’re designed to surface all the features buried inside Messenger as it strives to become more than just an SMS replacement. Beyond stickers and payments, M Suggestions also can recommend location sharing, timed reminders, group chat polls and ridesharing options from Lyft and Uber.
Facebook’s first personal assistant at scale
M Suggestions will open Facebook’s AI to a much wider audience. With the new Messenger composer redesign, many of the buttons for its different features have been collapsed inside an expandable menu, but M Suggestions will help you fish them out.
And rather than apply the same experience to everyone, M will learn individual users’ habits and personalize itself for them. If you always ignore the M Suggestions, you’ll see less of them. Or if you never use its payments feature but constantly send stickers, it’ll just suggest you use the latter.
And if you really hate M, you can use the Messenger settings to mute it entirely or turn off certain kinds of recommendations. Even though it’s only an AI, not a human, some people might be a bit freaked out by Facebook scanning the content of their messages to provide these suggestions.
For now, M Suggestions are focused on Messenger’s internal features. But the inclusion of the Lyft and Uber ride-hailing option signal it could have bigger ambitions for recommending outside developer services.
Facebook currently has a big issue with bot discovery, having launched the automated messaging agents last year without an easy way to find ones to use. M Suggestions could potentially evolve to recommend bots for you to pull into your conversations.
While there are plenty of problems M could one day help you solve, for now it’s dealing with one of Facebook’s longest-running issues: There are more features than you know what to do with.
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