Facebook's Answer to Siri and Cortana Is Called 'M'

— -- Facebook's answer to Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana is a virtual personal assistant called "M" that will be housed inside the company's Messenger app.

The social network wants users to know this one can do a lot more than answering questions and managing a person's calendar. M can actually help people complete tasks that other virtual assistants can't.

While M is artificially intelligent, it is trained and supervised by humans, making the service so smart that Facebook says it can "purchase items, get gifts delivered to your loved ones, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments and way more."

People lucky enough to be testing the service will be able to send a note to M in messenger, just as they would chat to a friend. M can understand queries such as recommending a restaurant and offering to make reservations.

"This is early in the journey to build M into an at-scale service," David Marcus, vice president of messaging products at Facebook said in a post. "But it's an exciting step towards enabling people on Messenger to get things done across a variety of things, so they can get more time to focus on what's important in their lives."