The vision of having an intelligent, virtual agent is big. A moonshot if you like.

Above anything else, the ease of interacting with an intelligence working on our behalf, ordering and booking things, scheduling, searching and retrieving recommendations has the potential to ease the next billion people into the digital world in a far simpler manner than the myraid of interfaces do now.

Recently Facebook announced its take on the Virtual Assistant, M, which is to be supported by a human workforce, to help you get things done.

It’s a significant step, with profound implications for Facebook’s future place in all our lives. As the big tech companies vie for ownership over our interactions with the world, we might not be far away from having Facebook arrange our dry cleaning, turn on our heating, or bring us food when we’re hungry.

Yann Lecun, in charge of the group’s Artificial Intelligence since December 2013, has spoken of a revolution on its way.

Mike Schroepfer, the company’s CTO, has said of Facebook in general that “eventually it is like this super intelligent helper that’s plugged into all the information streams in the world”. The company has been pretty open about where they see things going.

Source: thenextweb