Facebook just moved even closer to the center of your digital ecosystem with the roll-out of a smarter, more connected version of its proprietary AI assistant, M.
Speaking at this week’s Facebook F8 conference, the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and head of Messenger, David Marcus, announced plans to turn Messenger into a sort of “social living room” — one where you can chat, make dinner reservations, hail a cab, order food, and share music directly from Spotify. What that means, in essence, is that Facebook wants M to act as the digital butler in your social living room.
Messenger is no longer just a chat platform; it’s a personal assistant and, pretty soon, it could be one of the most lucrative advertising spaces we’ve ever seen. How M performs in the long run compared to competitors such as Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Cortana remains to be seen, but the most obvious advantage M has over all of them is that it exists within your conversations and will proactively make suggestions when it recognizes a point where it might be of assistance.
This is key to Facebook’s plan to embed Messenger at the very center of our daily digital lives. With Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, users have to ask about a specific task, while potentially breaking stride with whatever they were doing. With M, users never need to leave the Messenger interface, since M makes timely recommendations based on what it thinks you might need there and then.
Imagine you’re watching the Stanley Cup and chatting about it with friends…