Facebook's AI assistant, M, now offers suggestions in Messenger

Promising to "make your Messenger experience more useful, seamless and delightful," Facebook has launched suggestions from M to everyone in the US. M is the social network's AI assistant, and iOS and Android users can now benefit from behavior-based suggestions for content and actions as the assistant analyses conversations.

What this means in practice is that M might notice that you are chatting with a friend about sending them some money for something. Rather than waiting until you meet them in person, M will spring into action and suggest that you might like to send the money through Messenger. Other possible suggestions relate to Uber and Lyft, stickers, polls and locations.

As well as promoting M's suggestions as a way to make Messenger users' lives a little easier, Facebook says it also serves as a way to surface Messenger features and options that many people are not aware of. There's no need to do anything to activate M -- it's simply working away in the background and will spring into action when appropriate; it’s possible to mute the assistant if you find that it is irritating.

Facebook says:

When we announced M over a year ago, it was a small AI experiment powered by humans that could fulfil almost any request. We learned a lot and these interactions have enabled us to build a completely automated version of M that suggests helpful actions in your chat, exposing features people may not have known were available right in Messenger. Suggestions from M has been testing with a small percentage of users for the past few months -- and it has been a great success -- today we're expanding it to all Messenger users in the US.

Facebook shares details of the sort of suggestions M might come up with based on conversation analysis:

• Sending stickers: M shares fun sticker suggestions for your daily life interactions like "Thank you" or "Bye-bye."
• Paying or requesting money: M recognizes when people are discussing payments and gives them the option of easily sending or requesting money.
• Sharing your location: M can suggest an option to share your location during a conversation.
• Making plans: If people are talking about getting together, M helps coordinating a plan.
• Starting a poll (in group conversations only): Have a hard time making decisions in a group? M lets you set a poll topic and vote in group conversations.
• Getting a Ride: Talking about going somewhere? M suggests "Get A Ride" and shares an option of Lyft or Uber.

While the rollout is limited to the US for now, Facebook plans to bring M suggestions to other countries eventually. At the same time, Facebook is also rolling out a redesigned way to compose messages: "This update offers an easier way to access and discover Messenger features like our rich visual messaging tools and the ability to quickly share content like video and images directly from the text composer with a long press. We're also adding a "More" tab to more easily access Messenger features such as Games, Payments, Share Location and Rides."