Facebook to Shut Down 'M' Virtual Assistant Messenger Bot by January 19

Facebook is shutting down its text-based virtual assistant called 'M' that helped researchers train an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system.

Facebook opens up its M platform, calling it wit.ai, and letting developers build powerful AI for use as a bot.

Much as Microsoft announced at Build, the M bot platform will allow developers to pre-fab conversations or catchphrases which will return a response. If a user typed “I’m really hungry” to an app for a pizza restaurant, the bot may then ask “your usual, then?” as a static response.

But Now they are closing it. According to a report on The Verge, 'M' was available through a bot on Facebook Messenger and it was available to only about 2,000 people.

They Also said

We launched this project to learn what people needed and expected of an assistant, and we learned a lot," Facebook told The Verge.

"We're taking these useful insights to power other AI projects at Facebook. We continue to be very pleased with the performance of 'M' suggestions in Messenger, powered by our learnings from this experiment."