Last week, I received access to the beta version of M, which lives inside Facebook Messenger, through happenstance. (Beta testers can invite other people so long as they live in California.) The service first launched in August to a small subset of users; Facebook says it has a "few thousand" across California. It’s been advertised as an easy way to find a good local restaurant, get factoids you’d rather not have Google search for, and setting reminders. M can’t yet access other apps on your phone the way Siri or Google Now can, but it’s designed to be more powerful than those services.

That’s because Facebook has a growing customer service-style team of M "trainers" at its Menlo Park office who oversee the software. The few dozen contractors take the steering wheel whenever the query is beyond M’s capabilities, though Facebook says humans monitor communication from start to finish. That’s how I got my breakfast burrito. A real person saw the request come through M and made the phone call to Good Eats Cafe on Pine Street here in San Francisco, putting it in under my name. Had the cafe had its own online ordering system, like many pizza places do, M could have used my credit card on file with Facebook to pay for the order automatically.

using artificial intelligence to order a breakfast burrito

Placing an online food order is a neat example of lifestyle automation, but M felt revelatory when I had it call Amazon’s customer service line for me. I told M I wanted to check on a refund I was promised for an item that never arrived because it was damaged in transit. I had been on the phone once before with Amazon regarding the item, and they told me to wait a few days to see if the orders page processed the change. When it didn’t, I asked M to investigate.

The AI assistant only asked for the email address that I placed the order with and the product name. About 35 minutes later, I suddenly had an email from Amazon telling me my refund had been issued. M chimed in a few minutes later, telling me, "OK - Amazon has informed me that your refund is being processed and the amount will be reflected in your account in 2 to 3 business days!" Welcome to the future, I thought.

M is powerful, but how will it scale?

Eliminating the need to sit on hold with Comcast, Ikea, or United Airlines is a glorious gift I hadn’t quite considered software capable of solving. But how can something this powerful, with real humans doing real work unseen in the background, scale to the more than 700 million Facebook Messenger users around the globe?

The team behind M, which includes the 10-person startup Wit.ai that Facebook acquired back in January, says it’s approaching AI in this fashion because it doesn’t want to constrain the service. "You have lots of AIs — like Siri, Google Now, or Cortana — whose scope is quite limited," Wit.ai founder Alex Lebrun told Wired in August. "We wanted to start with something more ambitious, to really give people what they’re asking for." The goal is to have M learn from the trainers over time and become smart enough to take on new tasks. The team plans to increase the number of trainers gradually, but Lebrun says it won’t be easy.