Facebook has announced the testing of a new personal assistant service called M. According to the company, M is powered by artificial intelligence as well as supervised by humans. The company claims the assistant will be able to purchase items, get gifts delivered, book restaurants and travel arrangements, set appointments etc. Since the assistant is still in testing stages, there is no news on when the service will be widely available. The company mentions that “this is early in the journey to build M into an at-scale service.” However, Facebook will still likely beta test the product, so we might actually see ‘M’ roll out to some users before others. On going live, M will compete with other virtual assistants such as Siri, Cortana and Google Now. However, what makes Facebook’s initiative interesting is the addition of human intervention, although, given that M is still in testing stages, it's not clear how useful or practical human intervention will be. We will be interested to see if Facebook implements human intervention for backend work or to directly serve users. Either way, it will also be interesting to see how the company will scale the assistant, while delivering consistent results with human intervention. Other developments: - Earlier this month, Facebook extended its autoplay video ads to third-party mobile apps that sell ads through the social network’s Audience Network. There is an opt out for autoplay for videos in Facebook where users can set the feature only when the device is using WiFi.…
