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Facebook M Becoming Quieter, Offering Suggestions By Listening To Chat Conversations

M Suggestions

When Facebook introduced its assistant M, it was created as an autonomous assistant with users able to talk to it like talking to their friends.

But then Facebook tuned it down a bit so it stays more silent in the background, listening.

On April 6th, 2017, Facebook is rolling out 'M Suggestion', initially to users in the U.S..

As the name suggests, this newer version of M can give suggestions for various of features to users, based on keywords it picks up during a conversation.

M Suggestion can initially suggest the following actions:

  1. Sending stickers: M can suggest stickers, like when it sees "Thank you" or "Bye-bye."
  2. Paying or requesting money: When people are discussing payments, M can give them the option to send or request money.
  3. Sharing your location: M can suggest users to share location during a conversation.
  4. Making plans: When a conversation is about getting together, M can help them in coordinating a plan.
  5. Starting a poll: In group conversations only, M can help users set a poll topic.
  6. Getting a Ride: When a conversation is about going somewhere, M can suggest "Get A Ride" and shares an option of Lyft or Uber.

"When we announced M over a year ago, it was a small AI experiment powered by humans that could fulfill almost any request. We learned a lot and these interactions have enabled us to build a completely automated version of M that suggests helpful actions in your chat, exposing features people may not have known were available right in Messenger."

M Suggestion is another way of describing what an AI can do when it's able to understand conversation. However, when it comes to privacy, M Suggestion is crossing the line a bit.

Facebook isn't allowing users to turn M entirely off. Users can only mute M or some of its suggestions.

While M can be helpful during conversations, with users having no ability to turn it off means that M can be rather annoying. By listening to conversation, M continuously syncs itself with Facebook's servers, and this may not be acceptable for most people that concerns their privacy.