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Facebook employs AI Messenger service to provide suggestions and reminders

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By John Glenday, Reporter

April 7, 2017 | 2 min read

Facebook has further entwined its growing use of artificial intelligence within its Messenger service by rolling out its AI assistant to all US users.

The new service will enhance private messages sent between individuals by making suggestions based on the content of those messages such as booking an Uber or wiring cash to a friend.

Known simply as M, the functionality is still in testing and reliant on the input of human operators but its self-sufficiency has grown to the extent that Facebook is confident enough to unleash it into the wild.

Speaking to Recode Facebook’s head of messaging products David Marcus said: “The system learns from the things you like to do and you don’t like to do. If you don’t use the things that are being suggested for a specific use case, gradually those things will go away.”

Despite the technical accomplishments, issues remain in convincing a skeptical public to embrace AI oversight of everything they say, with Facebook at pains to stress that any information gathered will not be used to target individuals with ads.

In addition all private messages will remain off-limits to the prying eyes of human technicians, available to algorithms alone.

Facebook is presently engaged in an arms race with Google’s Allo and Amazon’s Alexa to develop a fully-fledged AI assistant.

Facebook is already employing behaviour prediction tools to root out potential terrorists using the platform.

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