Facebook has revealed its new added feature to the Facebook Messenger under a project named 'Moneypenny', a term derived from one of the James Bond movie. The project focuses on developing a virtual assistant similar to that of Apple's Siri and Cortana of Microsoft.
The upcoming virtual assistant will aid users in their research and online shopping. The new feature will also improve people-to-people interaction among users and will make them become more intimate with their device.
Facebook will not be following the steps of other tech companies which made digital and machine driven assistants. The social media site's virtual assistant will be completely man-powered. Real people will aid users with their online tasks.
Facebook wants to avoid the drawbacks of machine powered assistants which often mishear the users and provide generic and insufficient answers. The responses are also limited only to the services that the company can offer. Apple and Microsoft's assistant are not able to answer all the queries of the users.
The largest social media platform will be using a different approach in providing virtual assistance to their billions of users. Real people will answer calls to avoid common frustrations. Somehow, Moneypenny is more similar to GoButler and Magic.
Virtual assistants of tech companies are now getting more intelligent and more effective in responding to users' natural language inquiries, which also include gestures. Project Moneypenny is a great opportunity for Facebook to expand and to keep its 1.44 billion active users per month. Facebook Messenger has around 700 million monthly users who are watching out for the project.
The social networking site is now conducting internal tests for the new feature. Many believe that the codename 'Moneypenny' will be changed when a stable version of the virtual assistant is successfully created. T
he company has not yet revealed official details about the project, as well as the release date.