Facebook is bringing an AI assistant to Messenger in the form of ‘Suggestions from M’

Facebook is diving in the AI assistant game by introducing ‘suggestions from M‘. This works similar to Google Assistant in Google Allo where the AI framework from Google suggests the users in responses, search queries and other things. You can also talk to Google Assistant in its own chat window in addition to invoking it in any conversation.

‘Suggestions from M’ will work as part of AI assistant which will suggest features from Facebook and other apps on your smartphone depending on the context of the conversation. The feature can not be invoked in the conversation as a third party agent but instead of being intrusive, the assistant will suggest actions and responses to you and those suggested actions or responses will not be visible to the other user unless you respond using the suggested actions.

Image Credit: Facebook

These suggestions range from the assistant suggesting you to send your location when a person asks ‘Where are you?’ or asking you to set a reminder when they send ‘Let’s meet tomorrow at 6:30 PM’ or suggest you a GIF for ‘bye-bye’ when the user on the other end says ‘Goodbye’.

The app can also suggest payment options to send money if the conversation is around money owed or needed in addition to ridesharing options from Uber or Lyft as reported by TechCrunch. This feature is rolling out for Facebook Messenger users in the United States today on both iOS and Android.

You can choose to not use the suggestions suggested by the Assistant and it will not show the suggestions prominently or choose to show what you previously selected as the default response. The assistant learns about what a particular user prefers and changes the suggestions accordingly.

For instance, if you use a lot of stickers or emojis in your conversations to respond to messages, ‘Suggestions by M’ will include emojis and stickers. You can also choose to mute or turn off certain kinds of recommendations from the messenger settings.

One thing to note is that the suggestions are limited to internal Facebook Messenger features but they will be expanded to include other apps outside Facebook Messenger like Instagram, Uber, Lyft in near future. As reported earlier, Facebook added M as an AI to converse with back in 2015.

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