Facebook to shut down its personal assistant 'M'

It's time up for Facebook's personal assistant 'M' as users received messages yesterday that Facebook is shutting down the service on January 19th. The company confirmed the news in a statement to The Verge.

Facebook first unveiled M in 2015 as part of its Messenger app. The service, as originally conceived, differentiated itself from the crowded field virtual assistants by fulfilling more advanced tasks like booking appointments, ordering flowers and dealing with customer service.

“We launched this project to learn what people needed and expected of an assistant, and we learned a lot,” the company said in a statement. “We’re taking these useful insights to power other AI projects at Facebook. We continue to be very pleased with the performance of M suggestions in Messenger, powered by our learnings from this experiment.”

What really differentiates M from it's other competitors is its mix of AI and human skills. Behind the scenes, M relied on humans to answer the most complicated queries. Eventually, Facebook hoped that those humans would help train the artificial intelligence model to rely less and less on humans. However, this ambitious version of M was only available to a small pool of test users.

Last April, Facebook released a more underwhelming version of the service to the general public. The assistant effectively lurked in the background of conversations in Messenger and inserted "suggestions" when it deemed relevant.