Facebook M: the future of AI customer service?

If you live in San Francisco, Facebook Messenger has just given you a new friend: Facebook M.

M can do anything you ask. It will book plane tickets, reserve tables, answer questions, or just chat. It’s the best customer service you can imagine — and it’s all supported by machine learning. It gets to know you, and uses what it knows to make better choices.

There’s been some speculation about how it works. But following a Buzzfeed investigation, now we know. It’s like this:

The user provides a query (1). The AE has a go at answering (2). A human customer service person modifies the answer if necessary before sending it (3). M’s machine learning spots the difference between its suggestion and the final human response, and learns for the future.

This is a Facebook experiment today. But it might not be long before this kind of service is everywhere: intelligent artificial agents that respond to natural language conversation.

At Packt we want to help developers build the systems of the future. It’s good that we’re already providing high quality, successful books on machine learning. Applications like this show how pervasive these technologies might become.