Facebook Messenger chief: It will be years before everyone has M

If you were hoping Facebook would use last week's F8 conference to release its AI assistant M to the mainstream, you're going to have to wait a lot longer.

In an interview with The Verge, Facebook's Messenger chief David Marcus confirmed what many insiders have suspected for awhile: M won't be broadly available for "years."

Responding to a question about how to make M more useful, Marcus acknowledged the company still has a long way to go before it's ready for all Facebook users. 

Facebook began testing M in August; the service has been limited to a small group of early testers since then. Similar to products from startups like Magic and Operator, M is able to complete tasks like booking travel, ordering food and scheduling appointments. 

Though the goal is for M to one day be almost fully automated, the service still relies on a team of human supervisors to complete most of its requests. And, until Facebook is able to train its AI to be smart enough minimize human involvement, it simply won't be able to scale the service to its more than 1 billion users. 

That could take "years," Marcus said. 

Marcus said that, right now, Facebook is working to make M more proactive, describing an almost Google Now-like functionality that allows people to connect M to their calendars for proactive assistance. He also noted the need for more third-party bots in order to create a bigger ecosystem around bots.

You can read his full comments below [emphasis added].

We’re making M more proactive right now, so for people who have M we’ve added the ability to connect your calendar to it so it can help you ahead of you knowing you need help. So we’ve learned many things. We’ve learned that (a) we need to make it more proactive for people to build more of a habit, and (b) we’ve learned that we needed to build a variety of vertical bots to fulfill different types of intent. The fascinating thing, though, is to see the percentage of automated responses grow over time as the AI learns. And sometimes it stumbles, which is also interesting. But it’s a long-term experiment, and it yields results already today — because now not only have we learned a lot, we built tools that we’re opening up to everyone.

We have two goals with this one. One is building the product into something awesome, and that’s going to take years for everyone to have access to it. And then also building tools so that the whole ecosystem of things can be built around it. And those two can coexist, because if you have awesome bots that can do things, then if you ask M it can point you in the right direction.

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