Image credit – Alex Kantrowitz @ BuzzFeed
As some of you have heard, Facebook is working on a virtual assistant feature of their own for their Messenger app. Simply dubbed “M” at the moment, the feature has been officially announced and confirmed by the company, although last we heard it was still in the works. However it looks like it is slowly making its way to users.
Such is the case with a report from BuzzFeed in which the publication’s report Alex Kantrowitz was one day treated to an experience with the M virtual assistant, in which he decided to take it for a test drive to see what it could get up to. So far based on what we’ve seen, we are impressed with its capabilities.
For starters it seems to have a very conversational style of responses, versus more canned and “robotic” replies. It has the ability to look up restaurants based on your preferences and the area you are interested in. It even has the ability to help users to screenshots of websites, so if you’d rather not navigate to it yourself, hopefully the screenshots will give you enough information to go on.
It can help search for flights and even make bookings. It seems to be pretty smart and also can detect conversational styles typed out by the user, thus making it feel more friendly. As you can tell, it seems that Facebook M will be a very smart assistant, and if it really works out the way it does, it looks like built-in assistants like Siri, Google Now, and Cortana will have to work a lot harder.