Facebook's Virtual Assistant 'M' Is Super Smart. It's Also Probably a Human.

Facebook’s new virtual assistant for Messenger, M, is pretty darn impressive. It can arrange to have flowers delivered. It can warn you that it’s likely to rain. It can snag you hard-to-find tickets to the upcoming “Star Wars” movie.

At this point, M can do pretty much everything an actual human assistant might be able to do, short of picking up your dry cleaning. (Although it could arrange to have it delivered!) That’s great news for Facebook. The company is rolling out M as a way to keep people using Messenger and, eventually, get them shopping inside of it. An assistant to make that easier will certainly grease the skids on those efforts.

But there’s actually a simple reason for why M is so advanced. For the most part, M is much more human than it is software. Or rather, it’s powered by actual humans much more than it is by software.

The artificial intelligence technology used to power M is still in a very early stage, which means that while the system is learning some of the basic responses for popular requests, human moderators handle the bulk of the interactions with actual users, according to Facebook’s chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer.

“It’s primarily powered by people,” Schroepfer explained. “But those people are effectively backed up by AIs. The idea here is, you can ask it any question, not just the set of questions that it’s capable of. The thing that’s cool about this is it gives us a much wider training set, like what are the things people actually want it to help them [with].”

Facebook

In other words, making it human-powered versus machine-powered allows Facebook to get a more authentic glimpse at how people want to use the product.

Right now, Facebook is training M with supervised learning, a process where the computer learns by example from what human trainers teach it. If a user asks A, you respond B. Eventually, the idea is that M will know enough to operate without a human handler. Facebook has a team of people building neural networks — applications that help machines think and act like humans — and many of those applications are already live inside of M, Schroepfer says.

That doesn’t mean that M will fly solo any time soon. The feature is only available to a small group of beta testers in Silicon Valley, and the technology needs to become much less human-dependent before Facebook passes it out more broadly, Schroepfer said.

“The reason this is exciting is it’s scalable,” he added. “We cannot afford to hire operators for the entire world to be their personal assistant.”

Schroepfer also showed off a new tool Facebook is building that can actually describe what’s in a photo, and vocalize it through a verbal Q&A process with a user. So, if you asked Facebook what was in a picture, it could — without ever having seen the picture before — respond correctly, based on other photos it has seen. This tech hasn’t rolled out to users yet, but Schroepfer hopes that someday it will.

These efforts are part of a much broader push from Facebook to dive into artificial intelligence and deep learning as a way to personalize its service. It has one of the world’s top deep learning experts, Yann LeCun, running its AI division; the eight-person team from machine-learning startup Wit.ai, which Facebook acquired in January, is running M. The company won’t say how many operators it’s using for M, but BuzzFeed found that Facebook is using outside services like TaskRabbit to complete some of the requests.

By making Facebook smarter, the company can (theoretically) keep people using it longer, and with more regularity. If M truly does become your personal assistant, you’ll have reason to use Facebook every single day, and not just for posting photos.

Of course, Facebook isn’t the only one fighting for your attention. Both Apple and Google have their own personal assistants, too, and those come built in to millions of iOS and Android devices — no app download needed. They also both have built-in payment products — Apple Pay and Android Pay — well ahead of where Facebook may want to take Messenger.

Still, it’s likely that you’ll use whichever assistant performs the best, which means there’s added pressure on all three companies, and the robots they’re training, to figure this whole thing out. Part of this race will depend on talent. There aren’t a lot of deep learning experts available. That’s why Schroepfer has his pitch locked and loaded.

“The promise I made to all the AI folks that joined us is, ‘We’re going to be the best place to get your work to a billion as fast as possible,’” he said. “We’re trying to make that promise [come] true.”

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of big issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

So even though advertising is still our biggest source of revenue, we also seek grants and reader support. (And no matter how our work is funded, we have strict guidelines on editorial independence.)

If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today? Any amount helps.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via