
M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger - jasonlbaptiste
http://www.wired.com/2015/08/how-facebook-m-works/
======
shostack
My issue with these services is they always tout these use cases like:

> _" Can you make me dinner reservations?"_

or

> _" Can you help me plan my next vacation?"_

I'd really love to better understand who is actually asking those types of
questions in such a vague fashion, and what their use case is. When I'm
picking something as simple as a restaurant, I typically want options, I want
to read reviews, I want to consider distance, parking, attire, etc. While
their AI/human trainers might be able to handle this level of complexity
eventually, the actual phrasing of the question would likely be much more
complex than "can you make me a dinner reservation." Doubly so for something
like a vacation which has a lot more moving parts.

But I respect that I'm reflecting on a sample size of one...me. So I'd love to
hear from others with more insight into the data around this. Are people
actually searching with such generalized queries when it comes to tasks like
this? Do most people not sweat the details of things like which restaurant to
eat at, or where to spend hundreds or potentially thousands of dollars on a
vacation?

Not trolling, serious question.

~~~
viksit
Agree. Those are too broad.

I'm thinking " _get me a dinner reservation next sunday with patio seating for
5 in the east village at an upscale tapas place_ ".

As I mentioned elsewhere on this page, my thesis around conversational
interfaces isn't that they start off broad and use more Q/A to refine your
query. That's slow, and people are visual.

Rather, their power lies in the user being able to express a complex query in
one go - which is equivalent to tapping 10-15 filters and scrolling through
results - ideally combining data from sources that aren't limited to one
service.

You can now execute _related_ actions to your result set through the _same_
interface, without needing to shift to a single purpose app that would allow
you to take the action, but for most purposes, won't keep your context.

~~~
unabst
I think AI researchers and engineers tend to get too carried away with
decision making, when the more valuable service is about communication of
refined knowledge, which if I'm not mistaken is exactly your point. The
problem has nothing to do with "how can a machine guess the right answer" but
instead is all about "how can a machine refine all the options based on the
intentions expressed thus far".

Anecdotally, if we'd ask a real person "where is a good place to eat" the
chance we'd go there without more information is slim. And if we don't even
trust people, trusting Siri will be a while.

What we're really doing with these questions is making our hunger known, and
starting a conversation. We actually don't care that much about other people's
thoughts, and we may not even have anything in mind yet as far as where to
eat. We do care about how people feel if they are someone we care about, but
the thinking part we love to do ourselves.

So to offer a service that "thinks" is rather misguided, and may even
constitute a disservice. We already rejected the talking paperclip in 1996
[0]. It's failure wasn't it's intelligence, but in the value proposition
itself. To have a paperclip presume to know better and to tell you what to do
was not tempting. It's failure was it's existence.

Is it a glitch in the Matrix or is their pitch for Cortana identical?

> What is Cortana? Cortana is your clever new personal assistant.[1]

\--

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant)
[1] [http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/getstarted-
wha...](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/getstarted-what-is-
cortana)

~~~
waterlesscloud
If I ask someone I know what's a good place to eat, the odds are actually
quite high that I'll give it a try. I wouldn't have asked otherwise.

The issue here is one of trust, which is built on an individualized
relationship over time. When I ask someone I know for a recommendation, I'm
doing so because I already have a sense of their judgment. That's more the key
here- build a history of reliable judgment. That's the goal.

~~~
unabst
> history of reliable judgment

Right. This is certainly one path and the path most seem to be on, and exactly
the one that needs to be challenged. The key intuition here being that a
judgement, which is a decision, is not an answer to a logical problem. A
decision entails a will, and when our personal will is overridden by an
animated paperclip, we close said program. Decision != Answer.

People don't necessarily want decisions made for them, but rather, they want
assistance in making their own, or better yet, reasons to justify the
decisions they've already tentatively made. "Reliable judgement" is the
complete opposite of "a resource of intelligence". Certainly all of these
assistants feature a little bit of both, but I keep sensing the urge towards
the former. Worse yet, a decision is often treated as an abstraction that
somehow justifies hiding everything that went into that decision, even though
there is immense value in actually being told why. People have entire
conversations over _why_ to eat at some place as part of the process of
_sharing_ the decision to go there.

Even when used only as a resource, if only these robots wouldn't keep trying
to read our minds or insist on telling us what to do. Maybe a handful of
people will accept a robot's choice, but _everyone_ loves more information.

Maybe we shouldn't be looking for some secret sauce that enables robots to
make better generalized and _rational_ decisions than humans. Maybe we should
be building robots capable of assisting humans at better making their own
personal and _irrational_ decisions instead?

(edited for grammar)

------
roymurdock
_“You have lots of AIs—like Siri, Google Now, or Cortana—whose scope is quite
limited. Because AI is limited, you have to define a limited scope,” Lebrun
says. “We wanted to start with something more ambitious, to really give people
what they’re asking for.” This meant the team would need more than AI...Even
after bringing neural nets into the mix, he says, the company will continue to
use human trainers for years on end._

I can't help but picture a large, fluorescent-lit room of jolly old British
"trainers" in safari khakis running around admonishing misbehaving AI for
telling bad jokes, all the while trying to juggle placing calls to the DMV and
restaurants to make reservations for 700 million messenger users.

~~~
cylon13
Relevant skit:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4WrPkKc2Wg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4WrPkKc2Wg)

------
mbesto
The first thing I see when someone asks "find me a good burger place in
Chicago" is "how can companies game this through official ($) or artificial
(spam) means?"

~~~
pen2l
The first thing I thought after seeing that example is FB is the new Yelp.
Restaurants will have to pay FB for visibility and recognition...

Same thing as Yelp, just a lot scarier.

~~~
knn
Have mixed feelings about this like I'm sure many do. Greater convenience, but
less and less privacy.. Our Fb/goog/nsa overlords know what we eat, where we
shit, all of our conversations and relationships. What a scary world we live
in.

~~~
pen2l
Not to mention, it's probably less useful.

I am actually okay with the privacy I give up when using Google Now, for
example, because being passively informed about things I'm getting shipped to
my house, about traffic conditions to/from my house, etc. is nice. Giving up
privacy seems justifiable in those instances.

But FB suggesting restaurants, I just know that there will be money exchanging
hands. FB being FB, will extort small business owners into paying them hand
over fist to get considered for suggestions to the user.

~~~
knn
I'm totally fine with FB charging businesses for advertisement. It's a free
market, they can choose not to advertise there. Not a terrible exchange imo.
However, Yelp extorting businesses to pay them to remove bad ratings/give good
ratings is pretty shitty.

It would be pretty cool to order in the chat, 'deliver me 10 burgers from this
restaurant using doordash at 6pm'. I would rather not click through crappy
websites/enter my cc every time.

However every time we do do that, our habits and conversations get written in
stone (in multiple data sets being passed around and bought/sold everywhere).

------
msvan
This seems like a move into the Chinese-style mega-app where you can do
everything from one app - buy shoes, talk to your friends, figure out when the
train departs. Facebook already has two top-50 apps, and creating new,
unproven apps and promoting them to that point is expensive. So, to increase
influence they are putting more into the existing apps.

~~~
robinson7d
Who knows, they might move toward a mega-app. Consider for a moment, though,
that currently we're talking about Facebook Messenger, which is a huge, and
fairly recent example of the exact opposite thing happening (it was part of
Facebook, but pulled out into a separate app.)

~~~
Roodgorf
The odd thing about the example of Messenger is that as two separate apps they
seem highly coupled. AFAIK you need to sign in with a valid Facebook account
to use Messenger, so you're already very likely to have the normal app at that
point as I can't imagine anyone who would trust FB for messaging but not
everything else. On the flip side, barring a few possible holdouts of people
worried about app permissions, I don't know anyone who actively have FB
accounts but don't use their messaging service.

~~~
dublinben
I "actively" have a FB account by most measures, and I don't use Facebook
Messenger. I only access their mobile site through Tinfoil for Facebook, and
the messaging works just fine in that.

~~~
Roodgorf
Cool, I hadn't found any browsers that worked well with it mobily and
Messenger has become the lowest common denominator for group messaging, among
my friends at least, particularly for Android, I've just resigned to using it.
I'll check out Tinfoil for Facebook though, thanks.

------
visarga
> Today’s artificial intelligence, you see, requires at least some human
> training. If you want a system to automatically identify cats in YouTube
> videos, humans must first show it what a cat looks like.

The article is written by someone who doesn't know what he's talking about.
The "cat videos" story from a while back ostensibly used Unsupervised
training, that means, the Google team didn't have to tell the deep neural net
what a cat looks like, it discovered the concept of "catness" by itself (there
was a "cat" neuron in the top layer).

I'm wondering who writes all the AI articles I read every day. Such a detail
was crucial for the cat story. It's easy to make a cat/non-cat classifier with
a few thousand labeled images for each category. The hard thing to do is to
take raw photos with no labels and still discover cats.

~~~
ot
Unsupervised training may isolate the defining features of a cat picture, but
it won't know that that's what we call "cat", so no unsupervised system will
be able to identify cats in videos unless you show it at least one labeled
image ("show it what a cat looks like").

In fact that very network produced also millions of other "concepts", that is,
classes of images, that have no direct interpretability in human terms. The
"cat neuron" was a fun gimmick, but you're reading way too much into it.

~~~
chillacy
That's a semantic argument more than anything. A small furry mammal with four
legs, a long tail, whiskers, and pointy ears is what we'd call a cat, no
matter what word you assign to it.

~~~
hiddencost
The thing is the network didn't learn the features you described. Take a
simple example : neural networks confuse leopard print couches with leopards.
Why? Because the network learns discriminative features based on the data it
has. Theres not shared concept saying "oh this is an animal with for legs".

~~~
chillacy
Okay, so then ANNs can learn the "concept" of leopard print. I still think
that's interesting.

------
viksit
Thought: There's going to be a need for a very open platform that can do
things like this, which will offset many of the worries that have been echoed
on this thread today about one or a few corporations having access to
everything.

To use an analogy - if messaging apps are the new "browsers", then content
accessed through them are the new "websites". What FB is doing is the
equivalent of AOL in the 90s.

What then, is the equivalent of a search engine like Google/Yahoo, in that
world?

~~~
doublerebel
I believe we don't want an equivalent to Google/Yahoo -- we need an
improvement over search. Rather than trusting corporations to deliver the
knowledge we seek, we should rely on our personal trust graph -- like we did
in the old days. Otherwise the constant influx of biased, irrelevant
information will be overwhelming.

What if you could get a recommendation from your friend's friend without
asking them, and without violating trust or privacy? This is what I am
building today.

------
mintplant
_“The AI tries to do everything,” says Alex Lebrun, the founder of Wit.ai, a
startup Facebook acquired to help build this smartphone tool. “But the AI is
supervised by the people.”_

Congrats to ar7hur! Here's the original Show HN introducing Wit.ai:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6373645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6373645)

------
rebootthesystem
User: "Hello M."

M: "How may I help you?"

User: "What are my options for deploying a Python/Django project and making
sure it is setup for scalability from the start? Compare five hosting
providers for me. No, I don't know what metrics I should look for. Please
research these and let me know what they are when you deliver the report. I
also need an objective evaluation of our project in order to determine the
risks that might be involved in going with Python 3.x rather than 2.x in the
context of the libraries we might need to use in the future. Analyze the
nature of our application in order to determine what the applicable libraries
might be. Also, go through PEP's and make me aware of anything that might be
relevant to the above. You have one week."

M: "My responses are limited. Would you like me to find you a restaurant?"

User: "No. I've lived in this town all my life. I know where most restaurants
are and I know the handful I frequent. I need help with real questions. I can
get the latest weather report, I can find a restaurant, I can order pizzas, I
can go to the drive-through if needed and I sure as hell am not going to plan
a vacation for my family this way. What I could really use is having you run
through seriously time-consuming research, summarize results and present them
to me in an easy to consume form. What I could really use is having you save
me from doing 40 hours of research across 100 websites. Food, the weather and
vacations are not a problem."

M: "Ah, but there's a great new BBQ joint not too far from you"

User: "I'm vegetarian"

M: "My responses are limited. How would you like a thrilling and exciting
hunting safari in Africa?"

User: ":-("

~~~
golergka
But if it could answer this question well, it would mean that you would be out
of a job pretty soon and wouldn't be casually dining in restaurants on your
unemployment check anyway.

------
__michaelg
It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?

------
pdeuchler
Is it just me or does this article read as a thinly veiled sales pitch to
anyone else?

~~~
frostmatthew
[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
stevesearer
Bingo.

Article pitches aren't all inherently bad ideas for articles either. A good
example from my industry that I'm pretty sure was from a pitch is this one
from the WSJ [1]. The basic concept of regaining focus at work is a strong one
that resonates with people right now, but all the blog post ends up being is
an ad for the product.

[1] [http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2015/04/19/the-office-chair-
desi...](http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2015/04/19/the-office-chair-designed-to-
restore-your-focus-at-work/)

------
tomg
Have an ad network buy products on my behalf? No thanks.

~~~
hk__2
If the products match what you need or want, why would you refuse that?

~~~
tomg
The PA does not work for you, it works for FB. It has only FB's interest's in
mind. You are not it's employer as you do not pay for it.

It's not in FB's interest to make honest recommendations. If Bob's Burgers is
paying $1000/mo in FB ads, but Karen's Burgers keeps being recommended as the
"good burger joint", how long before Bob stops buying ads? And why would Karen
start buying FB ads since she's getting exposure for free?

~~~
nemothekid
> _If Bob 's Burgers is paying $1000/mo in FB ads, but Karen's Burgers keeps
> being recommended as the "good burger joint", how long before Bob stops
> buying ads? And why would Karen start buying FB ads since she's getting
> exposure for free?_

How is this any different than the approach laid out by Google Search? AFAIK,
Google isn't suffering in the "search ads" department.

~~~
goldfeld
The amount of real state that Google ads seem to take these days is offensive,
it's all ads above the fold and then some, on not-too-high resolutions. Google
Search is due for replacement.

------
viksit
Haha, it looks eerily similar to Myra, the cross platform assistant I launched
last week [1]. Including the name. Interesting times.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10060074](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10060074).

~~~
mrwilliamchang
Myra looks similar Magic to which was launched earlier this year. Also has a
name beginning with m. [http://www.wired.com/2015/03/stump-
magic/](http://www.wired.com/2015/03/stump-magic/)

~~~
viksit
True. Although, the name was chosen way earlier than Magic's launch actually!
So it's a coincidence.

But it's all AI - no human assists :)

~~~
mcintyre1994
I think I down voted this by mistake - sorry! Myra looks really cool :)

------
BinaryIdiot
The part I find most interesting here is I'm working on something mildly
similar in my spare time. Though it'll certainly be more limited than
something a big company like Facebook can come up with but I'm tired to
sending all my data every time I want to do something so I'm trying to squeeze
this into a phone without the need for the internet to, at least, process
commands. Oh and extending it will only require a little bit of JavaScript.

But I'm far away from launching it and it's only a side project. But it's cool
to see so many in the space doing something I also want / wanted to do.

------
fizzbatter
For those of you more familiar with NLP, are there some "dumb but effective"
techniques to approach [https://wit.ai/](https://wit.ai/) like functionality?
_(Libraries would be great, but i doubt there are any, for Golang)_

I know NLP is difficult, and frankly i hate doing it, but i want an expressive
language to "speak" to an internal process i use (a bot), and NLP seems like
the only solution. I imagine a rule based approach is best (for my simple
needs), but i have yet to see any examples that come close to wit.ai.

Appreciate any replies :)

~~~
viksit
See how annyang [1] does it. Forget the voice part (which it uses WebkitSpeech
for). It's how they interpret commands that's probably useful in your case.

It's pretty good for a basic set and you can train more. Ultimately, you need
something that is learning online and that will require an understanding of ML
techniques such as CRFs.

[1] [https://talater.com/annyang/](https://talater.com/annyang/)

------
dominotw
Calling this "AI" is bit of a stretch. Any software that responds in natural
language is not automatically AI.

------
jhgg
Very interesting that the human trainers are being used to train the AI to
eventually do their jobs.

~~~
rybosome
Jeremy Howard[0] gave a TED talk[1] in which he predicted that this would be a
short-term trend, where labelling data for AI will be an easy way to get a job
for a few years. He predicts that this will drop off as enough labelled data
is provided. I think this fails to consider that our expectations of AI will
increase along with our ability to manipulate increasingly large amounts of
data, so we will begin labelling increasingly complex data.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Howard_(entrepreneur)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Howard_\(entrepreneur\))
[1]:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_ter...](http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_terrifying_implications_of_computers_that_can_learn?language=en)

------
bla2
The cycle of software life:

1\. Motivated team in a larger company builds new, cool product (in this case
Messenger) 2\. It's good and becomes successful 3\. The rest of the company
wants to get in on that, think of ways to add value 4\. A bunch of stuff gets
bundled, some good, most bad 5\. Some of the original team stay around, most
get disillusioned and go work on something else 6\. Eventually, the app
becomes another iTunes

------
swalsh
I want Amazon to build a personal digital assistant, and then integrate it
into filters. Today I was searching for socks, I care about 3 things, the
size, the color, and whether they go up to the ankle or not. It seems like
information they probably have (or a well trained net could figure out), so it
would be nice if it was offered as a filter.

A few weeks ago I was trying to find toys for my son. I was most interested in
"things for a 6 month old". They did have that filter, but it was 0 - 24
months. At this age a few months make a HUGE difference. I wish the box was a
bit more fine grained.

~~~
Apocryphon
I wonder if Amazon leverages all of the human involvement in Mechanical Turk
for any machine learning.

------
btbuildem
Ah, Mechanical Turk strikes again..

~~~
bm1362
I worked in AWS for a bit and my favorite joke was to flippantly suggest mturk
as a solution to some convoluted architecture/process.

~~~
msellout
That's not a joke, that's a legitimate solution.

~~~
bm1362
It was often trivializing some discussion on state management. E.g. a database
failover or consensus loss

But, yes, it would have _worked_ if our requirements weren't so strict :)

------
viach
"It can purchase items, get gifts delivered to your loved ones, book
restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments and way more"

So it can spend my money in behalf of me?

~~~
evincarofautumn
Of course, is that unclear? “M can actually complete tasks on your behalf. It
can purchase items […]”

~~~
viach
Ahh, thank you for the explanation, I should really read more carefully! This
is indeed a great application of AI related technologies.

Ohh, wait, can it do something else?

------
marcusgarvey
Facebook's answer to Magic?

~~~
kzhahou
Implying that Facebook built this in response to a service that had a weekend+
of buzz?

~~~
marcusgarvey
Provided that they could also see the long-term business case for it -- do you
find that surprising?

------
apetresc
Anyone figured out how to sign up for the test? Is it a contact you can add to
your Messenger list, like chatbots of old?

------
kirk21
Pretty cool. Written about Slack bots before and my main complaint was that I
missed 'one bot to rule the all': [https://medium.com/@RecurVoice/rise-of-the-
slack-bots-5a7928...](https://medium.com/@RecurVoice/rise-of-the-slack-
bots-5a7928d404e7)

------
zkhalique
My main question is - how did facebook make a HUGE picture show up when you
share this page on facebook? Anyone know?

~~~
rwc
og:image - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph.

[http://ogp.me/](http://ogp.me/)

~~~
zkhalique
But usually it shows up as a small image

Apparently this is 4 images and it shows up like this:
[https://www.dropbox.com/s/1n8wkixfimkmvlr/Screenshot%202015-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/1n8wkixfimkmvlr/Screenshot%202015-08-26%2013.58.14.png?dl=0)

Can anyone do this? If so, how exactly?

~~~
natep
It appears to be a photo post (i.e. images uploaded to FB natively) as opposed
to a link post, where FB chooses a thumbnail for you (or not, if it's a
YouTube link). I've been seeing posts like this when friends upload image
albums (if more than 4 images, you get a 'see more' box in the lower right)

------
dhutchinson
I can appreciate FB trying to innovate, but with the on going privacy issues
and the fact that it seems they are just repackaging existing tech, i'm just
not into it.

------
cm2012
This is basically a search engine. That is insane news for the advertising
world if this is successful. Imagine FBs targeting + some intent information.
I am slavering...

------
chimeracoder
I really love the logo. I kind of wish they'd made it a mobius strip (this one
has two sides), but either way, it's awesome.

~~~
MikusR
That's Visual Studio logo.

~~~
BillTheCat
The old one is a mobius strip. The new one is more angular and 1 color.
[https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/visual-studio-homepage-
vs...](https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/visual-studio-homepage-vs.aspx)

~~~
jayrhynas
Even the old one isn't a proper mobius strip. In the transparent version[1]
you can see that the strip twists behind the crossing making it a normal loop.

[1]:
[http://www.multidmedia.com/common/img/Features/SDK.png](http://www.multidmedia.com/common/img/Features/SDK.png)

~~~
ino
lame. All serious, no fun allowed.

------
aiiane
I'm curious what the latency is like for interactions, given the human
element.

------
andybak
The article title has the word 'Facebook' in whereas the post just mentioned
'Messenger'. Is 'Messenger' clear enough? I'm old enough to think that refers
to Microsoft Messenger!

~~~
mcintyre1994
Annoyingly Google have called their newest SMS thing Messenger too so it's an
ambiguous term even on my phone.

------
umanwizard
It's M, not Q.

~~~
justinv
Exactly.

I assume OP was going for the James Bond feel, but it is M.

~~~
denzil_correa
> I assume OP was going for the James Bond feel

Well, M is also a fictional character in James Bond - head of MI6.

~~~
arethuza
The actual head of the Secret Intelligence Service is known as C:

[https://www.sis.gov.uk/glossary.html](https://www.sis.gov.uk/glossary.html)

------
ar7hur
It's M! [http://www.wired.com/2015/08/how-facebook-m-
works/](http://www.wired.com/2015/08/how-facebook-m-works/)

~~~
dang
Since that article contains more detail, we've changed the URL to it from
[https://www.facebook.com/Davemarcus/posts/10156070660595195](https://www.facebook.com/Davemarcus/posts/10156070660595195).
Happy to change it again if anyone can suggest a better.

------
andyl
What is the best alternative to Wit.ai, now that they have been consumed by
Facebook??

~~~
mildbow
Why do you want an alternative?[0]

Afaik, they haven't been shut down. It's actually even free now.

[0] not that it's a bad thing, but wondering it's more than just "facebook
bought it". Funny as it is, I trust that companies will go on when facebook
buys them as opposed to google or amazon.

~~~
andyl
Heck - you are right! Brought up wit.ai earlier today and it rendered a blank
page - thought they had been shuttered. But now I can see the full site and
the service looks stronger than ever.

------
zkhalique
Don't you mean M?

We have been building Q ! :)

------
nedwin
Related: I really dig the work KitCrm.com are doing in making it easy for
businesses to buy FB ads and do light marketing via SMS & messenger.

~~~
nedwin
ha! minus 4 points. Why the downvote?

