Facebook’s Answer to Cortana and Siri – The M Service

Facebook is testing a virtual assistant called "M" within its Messenger that can answer questions with live human help, and perform tasks such as buying gifts online and booking restaurants. Powered by artificial intelligence, M can assist in doing everything - from organizing birthday parties to calling companies so users do not have to spend hours on hold.

The M service, to be implemented inside Facebook Messenger, is the company’s attempt to rival Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana. Both are virtual personal assistants that communicate using voice recognition technology.

“It can perform tasks that none of the others can. That’s because, in addition to using artificial intelligence to complete its tasks, M is powered by actual people. M is powered by artificial intelligence that's trained and supervised by people," said David Marcus, vice president of Messaging products, wrote on his Facebook page on Wednesday.

Tech giants today are engineering products to act as virtual personal assistants as part of a hot growing market. Apple’s Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana rely entirely on technology. Since technology can’t replace a human, the range of tasks which can be performed are limited in nature. TaskRabbit, for example, employs people to respond to text-based requests. M is a hybrid personal assistant, assisted by a group of Facebook employees known as M trainers who will make sure that every request is answered and fulfilled.

This is the latest entrant in the ever-increasing war for virtual assistant domination, which like the internet wars of the dot-com boom, could set the winner for the next stage of the internet. Virtual assistants could dominate users’ attention and direct them to particular businesses for their needs.

M is trained and supervised by a team of contractors at Facebook, who will oversee more complex requests until the assistant becomes ‘smarter’.

The service is being tested by a few hundred users in the Bay Area, the very place Facebook has established its headquarters.

Q3 Technologies is headquartered in Boston and has offices in Dallas, New York, Germany and UK with development centers in Massachusetts, Michigan and India. The company was established in 1996 and is one of the leading global IT/ software service providers. Q3 Technologies is a Microsoft certified gold partner. It's offshore software product development and software engineering processes have been awarded the prestigious CMMI level 3 and ISO-9001:2000 certifications.

Over the recent years, Facebook has introduced several functions inside Messenger to transform it into a standalone platform as a software development company in the US. Games exclusively on Messenger were launched earlier this year, followed by products for businesses to directly connect with consumers.