Facebook updates 'M' — removing humans from virtual assistant

Facebook is saying farewell to "M," its human-led virtual assistant — at least in its current form, The Verge reported on Monday.

The product, available via Facebook Messenger, was released back in August 2015 and available only to about 2,000 people in California. It combined artificial intelligence with real humans to complete tasks for users like sending flowers.

Back then, Facebook pitched the idea as a "beta" test and made it available to a handful of users, but members of the team implied it would be expanded. Facebook's Messenger chief David Marcus told The Verge back in 2016 that M wouldn't be broadly available for "years."

"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," Marcus said.

Unfortunately, we'll never have M like it was before. Facebook is removing the human element of the service. The contractors assigned to the project will be offered other jobs at the company, according to The Verge. The service ends on Jan. 19.

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As M told James Bond, "At least I got one thing right." Yeah, at least Facebook didn't fire them all unexpectedly like they did to contractors working on the Trending Topics team.

They've learned a lot, as a company and with M, apparently.

“We launched this project to learn what people needed and expected of an assistant, and we learned a lot,” Facebook said in an emailed statement to Mashable. “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.”

For Facebook, M isn't completely gone. M suggestions — the part of Messenger that suggests making a calendar appointment, ordering an Uber, completing payments, and sending stickers or GIFS — will remain.

Facebook doesn't seem like it's giving up on assistants in general. In case you were really inclined to get one, a former Facebook executive is behind the digital assistant Fin. Unlike Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, Fin emphasizes learning your habits. But that comes at a price. Fin starts at $120 per month and $1 per minute the service spends on requests.

But don't expect someone at Facebook reading and completing your requests for flowers anytime soon.