Facebook creates an artificially intelligent virtual assistant – Express.be

V ia the Messenger application from Facebook users will soon be able to get help for all kinds of jobs. Facebook is working after all, the creation of a virtual assistant that is integrated into the chat application and which, thanks to artificial intelligence should be able for example to help a birthday party organize or help the customer of a company contact.

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Facebook has named his M virtual assistant. It is intended that M can compete eventually with other assistants who can fall back on artificial intelligence, such as Siri from Apple or Microsoft Cortana. Facebook, however, wants to go further than its competitors.

According to David Marcus, vice director of the messaging section of Facebook, M is in contrast to other virtual assistants in a completely independent way tasks the user can handle.

“The assistant can shop, gifts deliver, restaurants or book trips, appointments and much more,” Marcus noted in a Facebook post. Marcus since last year working for Facebook. Previously, he was chief executive at the payment service PayPal.

User Data must M intelligent

M is currently under tested a number of Facebook users in California. A team of Facebook engineers is working on training the virtual assistant and will intervene when users ask more complex questions, so they occasionally can get a human response from the assistant.

Currently the assistant will take into account only the information the user empowering him. In time, however, it is likely to keep the virtual assistant can also make use of the massive amounts of data that Facebook possesses about its users. This would M quickly be more intelligent than the virtual assistants of Apple and Microsoft.

Facebook is highly committed to its Messenger application, because the company hopes the application a new source of income could be. Therefore, the company bought last year at a cost of $ 22 billion competing chat service WhatsApp.

This year brought Facebook’s Messenger app-for-Business from. This enables customers with a chat message transfer among more money to send to friends or gifts.