by Aakriti Shrivastava Facebook is shutting down its virtual text assistant M, after keeping it operational for over two years. The last day of M will be January 19, reports The Verge. M users received messages from Facebook notifying them that the service is shutting down. Is Facebook M shutting down? pic.twitter.com/kcBa7ep6Sf — Ryan Sarver (@rsarver) January 8, 2018 M was first introduced in August 2015, in what was called a response to Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortona, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google Assistant. However, unlike these audio assist services, M was integrated in Facebook's chat application Messenger. M combined real-human assistance and artificial intelligence to help users carry out a range of tasks. Facebook told The Verge, that it launched this project to learn what people needed and expected of an assistant, and that it learned a lot. It added that, “We’re taking these useful insights to power other AI projects at Facebook. We continue to be very pleased with the performance of M suggestions in Messenger, powered by our learnings from this experiment.” The service, as originally conceived, differentiated itself from the crowded field virtual assistants by fulfilling more advanced tasks like booking appointments, ordering flowers and dealing with customer service. However, failure to build AI technology to automate M, has reportedly led to its shut down. Despite Facebook’s vast resources, M allegedly never surpassed 30% automation. AI at Facebook Artificial Intelligence has been at the centre of Facebook’s research and many of its recent developments. Most recently, Facebook expanded…
