Since Facebook reaped its successes with the purchase of WhatsApp or Instagram, and having placed other services such as Facebook Messenger in a fairly dominant position, this has achieved that will increase the desire of Mark Zuckerberg for continuing to enter our devices with a greater presence. Virtual assistants are a category that is being desired by many companies, and Zuckerberg's could not miss the appointment.
Today Facebook has unveiled its bet to counter Siri, Google Now and Cortana with a digital assistant that will try to be something different from what happened with those named. Facebook M will be entered directly into Facebook Messenger to answer your questions and for those moments in which the algorithms «don't know what to say», we are facing an assistant who has been trained with real people, so their help can be more considerate when compared to other attendees.
A different bet
As such, Facebook says its artificial intelligence has been trained and supervised by real people. So this announcement in part confirms the rumors that occurred in the past weeks where it was said that the company was behind the development of a voice assistant of its own accord.
Facebook M not only provides information and data, but it can help you place orders and reservations in locations close to where you are. Facebook wants you to offer a total experience and the user does not have to relegate in a search engine that can be used in a web browser when the user cannot find what they were looking for in the voice assistant.
So «M» will appear as your own contact with which we can start a conversation or ask you things so that we don't even have to leave this window to search. The difference with Cortana, Siri or Google Now is that it does not offer predictive search results, so Zuckerberg's bet goes the other way, although later his goal is the same, that users are glued to his service and do not jump to another .
Direct against the competition
It was also rare that Zuckerberg's company did not approach this category of apps that usually combine a lot of activities and actions. If we already saw how it was introduced directly into online messaging by the hand of WhatsApp or what photography is thanks to Instagram, Facebook's attempt with M is a whole greater bet, since part of himself to provide a service in which you have to put a lot of effort to try to offer something different from Siri, Google Now or Cortana. Just two days ago we were talking about the incorporation of the Cortana public beta.
At the moment M is in the testing phase for a group of a hundred people in San Francisco. Due to this development phase, it will still take a while to reach the other Facebook Messenger users.
A great novelty that will continue to add so that Messenger will be something more than an app for online messaging as in the beginning it was his great goal.
nice