Facebook scraps human-powered personal assistant M

Facebook has pulled the plug on a test project involving the personal assistant M. The assistant was available to a limited group of users and worked with both artificial intelligence and real people.

Facebook informs The Verge that the company has learned a lot from the test project. “We are taking these insights into other AI projects at Facebook,” said a spokesperson. M was announced in 2015 as a hybrid assistant that not only runs on artificial intelligence but also uses human employees. Partly because of this, it was intended that M could help Facebook users more autonomously, for example with making purchases and delivering gifts.

A purely artificial intelligence powered variant of M for making suggestions in Messenger came out last year. This chatbot will remain available according to Facebook. Facebook does not mention a reason for the deletion of the M partly managed by humans. That assistant became available to just 2,000 users in California during the beta.