Facebook M has been unveiled yesterday. It’s a personal assistant currently in beta, and it’s being tested by about 200 totally random users in the Bay Area. Facebook M is quite unique, mainly because it employs human power. These trainers-of-the-M are capable of completing real day to day activities like buying an item or making a reservation.
We don’t know what the M will turn into, what we do know is that it won’t be your run of the mill personal assistant. Well, if it’s different it should be better, right?
Well, not exactly.
Digital assistants are pretty weak at the moment. Regardless, they are forced upon consumers. M seems to be a different kind of beast – seems to be. At the dawn of this millennium, when flip phones where introduced to voice control, people where in awe. It ended up being a gimmick that you could show off and laugh in its face.
Technology is growing exponentially, and tech industry behemoths are trying to revive it. It does have tremendous potential, but Facebook M will be found inside the Messenger app and it will be text-based. This is a huge mistake.
Why?
Cortana, Google Now and Siri are personal assistants, but they are quite different from one another. The only common ground is that all three of them live in their own ecosystem. Highly popular ecosystems which we carry on a daily basis.
Zuckerberg’s M doesn’t have its own home. Unless Facebook is planning on unveiling their own OS anytime soon, it’s not going to have it in the near future. Digital assistants need their own hardware in order to be fully integrated, and subsequently useful.
There are too many steps a user has to make to get to M. But, if they play their cards right, Facebook might just hit gold. The Messenger App is installed on almost every smartphone on the planet. Zuckerberg just announced via Facebook that on the 24th of August 2015, a Monday, one out of seven people tuned into the social media platform.
That’s approximately 1 billion people.
Facebook is looking a little bit naive with their promos. In the screenshot below, someone asks M what is the best burger joint in Chicago, and the DA replies with a link. Why would you need to use something else when you already have Google?
Why would you use M in the first place? You need to type sentences in the Messenger App, coherent sentences mind you, so Facebook M understands what you are asking. You could just type keywords in Google and get the desired info.
If there’s a problem with the reservation then you either have to a) type more messages, or b) call the restaurant yourself. Why not do this in the first place without going through all this hassle?
Text-based is confusing, and more so annoying as hell. Phrases can be misinterpreted, and ladies, we’ve all had a ton of text-based fights with boyfriends or girlfriends. It’s not a pretty sight.