You may soon have a new reason to use Facebook Messenger.
The company is experimenting with a new personal assistant feature for Facebook Messenger that can complete tasks for you, Facebook's Messenger chief David Marcus revealed Wednesday.
The assistant, nicknamed "M" can make purchases, book travel, and schedule appointments from within Messenger. The service is "powered by artificial intelligence that's trained and supervised by people," according to Marcus. M is able to understand conversational queries and act on them from within Facebook, according screenshots of the assistant-like service.
"Unlike other AI-based services in the market, M can actually complete tasks on your behalf," Marcus, wrote in a Facebook post. "It can purchase items, get gifts delivered to your loved ones, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments and way more."
Facebook is just beginning to test the service, Marcus said. It's not clear how many people it's being tested with, though it sounds like the experiment is still in a relatively early stage. The service, which will be a direct competitor to Siri, Google Now and Microsoft's Cortana, goes a long way toward explaining Facebook's increasing emphasis on Messenger as a standalone service over the last year.
The company has been rumored to be working on a Messenger-based personal assistant feature for the last several weeks. Earlier reports suggested it was testing a shopping-focused assistant internally nicknamed "Moneypenny."
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