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M, a personal digital assistant inside Facebook Messenger
- chimeracoder 11y agoI 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 11y agoThat's Visual Studio logo.
- BillTheCat 11y agoThe 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.aspx https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/visual-studio-homepage-vs...
- jayrhynas 11y agoEven 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 11y agolame. All serious, no fun allowed.
- mbesto 11y agoThe 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 11y agoThe 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 11y agoHave 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 11y agoNot 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 11y agoI'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).
- nashequilibrium 11y agoThat is because you remember the world of privacy, the generation that has grown up with facebook do not.
- umanwizard 11y agoIt's M, not Q.
- justinv 11y agoExactly. I assume OP was going for the James Bond feel, but it is M.
- denzil_correa 11y ago> I assume OP was going for the James Bond feel Well, M is also a fictional character in James Bond - head of MI6.
- justinv 11y agoYes, but I meant more from the gadget-assistant side of things. Q seems fitting (in terms of James Bond characters) to be your personal AI.
- arethuza 11y agoThe 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
- samuellavoie90 11y agoI had my hopes up, Expecting Q from star trek.
- x5n1 11y ago"STOP THIS RIGHT NOW, Q!" was going to be my next thought.
- toomuchtodo 11y agoI would love to see John Oliver integrate that into a bit.
- ar7hur 11y agoIt's M! http://www.wired.com/2015/08/how-facebook-m-works/ http://www.wired.com/2015/08/how-facebook-m-works/
- dang 11y agoSince 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.
- viach 11y ago"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 11y agoOf course, is that unclear? “M can actually complete tasks on your behalf. It can purchase items […]”
- viach 11y agoAhh, 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?
- zkhalique 11y agoDon't you mean M? We have been building Q ! :)
- zkhalique 11y agoDon't you mean M? We have been building Q ! :)
- zkhalique 11y agoMy main question is - how did facebook make a HUGE picture show up when you share this page on facebook? Anyone know?
- rwc 11y agoog:image - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph. http://ogp.me/ http://ogp.me/
- zkhalique 11y agoBut 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%202015-08-26%2013.58.14.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/1n8wkixfimkmvlr/Screenshot%202015-... Can anyone do this? If so, how exactly?
- natep 11y agoIt 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)
- apetresc 11y agoAnyone figured out how to sign up for the test? Is it a contact you can add to your Messenger list, like chatbots of old?
- nedwin 11y agoRelated: 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 11y agoha! minus 4 points. Why the downvote?
- marcusgarvey 11y agoFacebook's answer to Magic?
- kzhahou 11y agoImplying that Facebook built this in response to a service that had a weekend+ of buzz?
- marcusgarvey 11y agoProvided that they could also see the long-term business case for it -- do you find that surprising?
- tomg 11y agoHave an ad network buy products on my behalf? No thanks.
- hk__2 11y agoIf the products match what you need or want, why would you refuse that?
- tomg 11y agoThe 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?
- StavrosK 11y agoBecause Facebook will then be the "inaccurate recommendation engine" and users won't pay any attention. I don't think it's that surprising that Facebook has an incentive to work well.
- bduerst 11y agoI get the trust issues with FB, but they are also incentivized to make the best match with you and to be useful.
- nemothekid 11y ago>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.
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- msvan 11y agoThis 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.
- acchow 11y ago> Facebook already has two top-50 apps I count 4: Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram.
- robinson7d 11y agoWho 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 11y agoThe 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.
- chromedude 11y agoYou actually don't need to have a Facebook account anymore to use Messenger. http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/06/sign-up-for-messenger-without-a-facebook-account/ http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/06/sign-up-for-messenger-wi...
- viksit 11y agoActually no - FB messenger now works purely on just phone numbers as well, without a FB account being required. This is a shift they've made to compete with the other messaging apps out there. That said, they prefer and guide you at every point to use an FB account to sign up vs making it easier for you to keep the two de-coupled.
- swalsh 11y agoI 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.
- sib 11y agoWait for Alexa (the "entity" behind Echo) to evolve a bit further and integrate more of what Amazon knows about you.
- Apocryphon 11y agoI wonder if Amazon leverages all of the human involvement in Mechanical Turk for any machine learning.
- roymurdock 11y ago“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 11y agoRelevant skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4WrPkKc2Wg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4WrPkKc2Wg
- viksit 11y agoHaha, 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 11y agoMyra 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 11y agoTrue. 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 11y agoI think I down voted this by mistake - sorry! Myra looks really cool :)
- volaski 11y agoIt sounds ridiculous to hear someone claim originality for an idea as generic AND faddish as text based assistant. If you seriously didn't know of apps like these existed before you launched (text based assistants with a human name), just google them up and you'll find tons launched since last year. I'm sure even YC has at least 3 companies that launched with this model.
- dhutchinson 11y agoI 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.
- __michaelg 11y agoIt looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?
- andybak 11y agoThe 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 11y agoAnnoyingly Google have called their newest SMS thing Messenger too so it's an ambiguous term even on my phone.
- mikeash 11y agoI assumed it was about Yahoo's product.
- andybak 11y agoMods have edited the title now. Good call.
- btbuildem 11y agoAh, Mechanical Turk strikes again..
- bm1362 11y agoI worked in AWS for a bit and my favorite joke was to flippantly suggest mturk as a solution to some convoluted architecture/process.
- pdeuchler 11y agoIs it just me or does this article read as a thinly veiled sales pitch to anyone else?
- ilaksh 11y agoMy guess is that since people don't pay for subscriptions and rarely click on ads, Wired and some other publications make most of their money now from paid promotional 'journalism'. I would rather have that than nothing. Everything costs money.
- stevesearer 11y agoThis is more likely a case of Facebook "pitching" the story to Wired than Facebook paying Wired to run a paid promotional story. If you don't bite and do a story about the new Facebook thing, all of the other outlets will and you lose out on those potential readers. Because there are so many potential different outlets for where people can read about these bits of news, the PR people have the upper hand under the current views-based model.
- frostmatthew 11y agohttp://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- stevesearer 11y agoBingo. 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-designed-to-restore-your-focus-at-work/ http://blogs.wsj.com/atwork/2015/04/19/the-office-chair-desi...
- cm2012 11y agoThis 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...
- SANDIP123SONDD 11y agoStored XSS Vulnerability In Paypal To Steal Your Credit Card Information http://haktuts.blogspot.com/2015/08/stored-xss-vulnerability-in-Paypal-to-steal-Your-Credit-Card-Information.html http://haktuts.blogspot.com/2015/08/stored-xss-vulnerability...
- mintplant 11y ago“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
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- viksit 11y agoThought: 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?
- lbotos 11y agoFor a period, a few people thought that twitter had enough sway to be that new "messaging search" engine. I've used it in such a way when I wanted to find hyper localized information.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- wallacrw 11y agoThe search engine would have to be the NLP and information retrieval that's turning the requests into actions or answers. Which is why I'll now plug the company I work for, MindMeld, since (i) we do that better than Wit and (ii) we are not feeding our data to an advertising team.
- doublerebel 11y agoI 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.
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoThe 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.
- shostack 11y agoMy 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.
- tsurantino 11y agoThe initial example is broad, but can't this just be extended with additional questions? For example, can you tell me about dinner options that cost less than $20 per person. What are other people saying? How far away is this? It's questionable whether each of these follow up questions is actually that complex. I think you are arguing that things get hard if a user tries to put that together in one single complex query. Do people do that though? I think the idea with a conversational interface is that it's succinct and on-demand. You receive the most relevant information directly in as simple of an interface as possible (arguably).
- viksit 11y agoIt's also extremely slow. It's much faster for me to hit a few filters on things like prices and locations. Distance is just a simple ".2 miles away" text on the box, which shows an image and snippets of reviews. People are more and more visual. I don't think a conversational interface _replaces_ a visual one. It's that the initial query can be complicated, and it allows you to get into that 5-6 tier deep part of your search that you would have gotten to by using 5 filters and scrolling through 50 results.
- visarga 11y ago> 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.
- bhouston 11y agoIt may have used tags on YouTube videos to identify which had cats. Not sure if that counts as completely unsupervised.
- visarga 11y agoNope. Here's the link to the paper Google team published in 2002. Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.6209 http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.6209 From the abstract: Contrary to what appears to be a widely-held intuition, our experimental results reveal that it is possible to train a face detector without having to label images as containing a face or not. The Cat detection thing was just a side product of learning to identify features of things in an unsupervised manner, but the news outlets locked on to that with titles such as "How Many Computers to Identify a Cat? 16,000" in NY Times. Wasn't it amazing that they could distill the concept of cat from images with no help from external labels (human intervention)? They missed the core of the discovery by not understanding that. The deep learning method is an unsupervised way to process raw input and transform it into useable features. This used to be done by a combination of domain knowledge and supervised training, but they could build an automated way to extract relevant features from images. This opened the window for hope that one day neural networks will be easily applied to any new domain if there is sufficient raw data to build a deep network for it. In the past there was a need for a large investment in human based data labeling and how to extract the best features from raw data (also described as voodoo magic by the same researchers - it was hard, it was domain locked and expensive).
- fizzbatter 11y agoFor 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 11y agoSee 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/
- julien_c 11y agoYou could have a look at AIML and something like Program AB.
- dominotw 11y agoCalling this "AI" is bit of a stretch. Any software that responds in natural language is not automatically AI.
- jhgg 11y agoVery interesting that the human trainers are being used to train the AI to eventually do their jobs.
- rybosome 11y agoJeremy 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_terrifying_implications_of_computers_that_can_learn?language=en http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_ter...
- rebootthesystem 11y agoUser: "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 11y agoBut 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.
- JetSpiegel 11y agoM: Bing Edition
- andyl 11y agoWhat is the best alternative to Wit.ai, now that they have been consumed by Facebook??
- mildbow 11y agoWhy 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 11y agoHeck - 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.
- kirk21 11y agoPretty 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-5a7928d404e7 https://medium.com/@RecurVoice/rise-of-the-slack-bots-5a7928...
- aiiane 11y agoI'm curious what the latency is like for interactions, given the human element.
- bla2 11y agoThe 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