When the M Assistant was about to make its appearance for the users, Facebook recently declared that it is going to end the beta version and its functionality will be discontinued from January 19 but it’s some of the features like M Suggestions will keep on working as it is.

What is M Assistant?

This is Facebook’s version of virtual assistant but is an amalgam of human operators and artificial intelligence that will be in background to support the system. With its discontinuation, Facebook will now shift those 2000 employees to some other positions within the company. Though previously these M Trainers worked by assisting the chatbot which was used to handle tasks of booking or reservations.

The Shortcomings with M

Unlike other virtual assistants like Siri, Cortana etc. Facebook M is constrained to beta only. Within this, Facebook M was refrained from giving suggestions inside chats while moving towards calendar or any one-tap suggestion. Even the chatbot introduced GIFs for some responses.

What does Facebook has to say on this?

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

Features that will be left behind

Though the actual feature is about to end, Facebook M contains M Suggestions that are integrated in the conversations and will remain in the platform. These M suggestions looked for keywords when a conversation is prompted and thus makes suggestions.