It looks like Facebook is bringing a little more artificial intelligence to Messenger. While the “M” virtual assistant hasn’t enjoyed a very wide rollout just yet, Facebook is testing a new feature for M called “M Suggestions.”
The feature, according to a report from Buzzfeed, essentially offers users certain actions based on contextual awareness within your conversations with other people — similar to how Google Assistant works within the Allo messaging app. For example, M could offer you a selection of stickers based on your conversations without you having to go searching through all those stickers yourself.
M itself has been in the testing phase for over a year now, and it still has no official release date for a wide rollout. Still, according to Buzzfeed, which spoke with Facebook’s David Marcus, the company does want to release it to the public at some point soon. If M Suggestions proves to be successful, it could help push M out to a wider range of people sooner — Facebook of course is known to have over 1 billion users.
“Hopefully with this side of it, we’ll have a path to opening it up to everyone fairly quickly,” said Marcus in the report.
Facebook M could introduce some very interesting competition between Facebook and Google — Google Assistant is Google’s latest digital assistant, and it lives not only in Android, but in the Allo messaging app, too. If Facebook M is released to the wider public, it will be interesting to see how the features between the two assistants compare.
M Suggestions will roll out to a small segment of Facebook users over the next few months. Hopefully, however, we’ll see it get a much wider release in the near future.
