Following in the footsteps of Google Now, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft's Cortana, Facebook has launched its own virtual personal assistant, simply named M. M is being baked into the company's Messenger app, and, unlike its competitors, is powered not just by technology, but by real people.

A team of employees, dubbed M trainers, will work alongside the software to ensure that every request is answered. The idea is to go beyond the likes of Siri and Cortana, and offer a true personal assistant experience, allowing users to do things like have gifts delivered, book restaurants, and make travel arrangements.

Currently, M is entirely text based. The few hundred users in the Bay Area who have been given access to the app can tap a new button in Messenger to send a request directly to M, at which point either software completes it, or a human does. Users won’t directly know whether it was a computer or a person that helped them.

In an interview with Wired, David Marcus, vice president of messaging products at Facebook, said that Facebook’s goal is to make Messenger the first stop for mobile discovery, instead of Google Maps, Siri, or Twitter. In internal tests, Facebook employees used M to organise dinner parties, track down unusual beverages in New Orleans, and even have their desks redecorated "in a French style."

One of the most popular requests from employees was having M call their cable company in order to avoid the hold times and automated messages that can grind down even the most patient of people. That makes M an expensive proposition, particularly as the company expands the service out from its trial in the Bay Area to other users, and intends to keep it free. Currently more than 700 million people use the Messenger app.

Facebook hopes to make money by partnering with certain businesses that receive a lot of requests through M. "If, for instance, you have a lot of calls that have to be placed by people to cable companies," Marcus told Wired, "that’s a pretty good signal that their customers would actually like a better way to interact with the company and maybe they should have a presence inside of Messenger directly."

There's also the data side of the business. While M doesn’t currently pull data from your Facebook social graph to complete tasks, it will use its own data to help improve the service. "We start capturing all of your intent for the things you want to do," said Marcus. "Intent often leads to buying something, or to a transaction, and that’s an opportunity for us to [make money] over time."