Facebook’s M can schedule meetings and do your shopping — but don’t call it “she.”
Facebook Messenger isn't just for getting hit on by people you went to high school with anymore. On Wednesday the company announced an experimental new feature that could someday make Messenger much more useful.
M is something like a combination of TaskRabbit and Google Now: a digital personal assistant that relies on a combination of automated and human labor to help make busy lives easier via digital communication. M can make you a doctor's appointment or tell you where to go hike for the weekend — but it can also book your dinner reservations, order a birthday gift for your dad, or help you plan a party. Simply message M — a faceless, identity-less chat contact — as you would a friend, and voila! Facebook announced the product today but is rolling it out gradually across a select number of Bay Area users, according to Wired.
But unlike similar products, M doesn't evoke a person or a character. Apple has Siri, the feminine-voiced and -named natural language processing feature that comes standard on all devices. Amazon has Alexa, a "cloud-based voice service" that comes installed on Echo devices, which can control anything from the lights in your home to the music on your stereo. And Microsoft named Cortana, its answer to Siri, after a female character in the Halo video game:
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The fact that the designers and engineers who have built these products across tech companies have so frequently opted to give them feminine characteristics has not gone without notice, in the press and in academia. The popularity of the film Her – in which the protagonist, played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love with his operating system "Samantha," voiced by Scarlett Johansson — also brought some some attention to the issue of how digital labor is gendered. The first interaction in the film between Phoenix and his soon-to-be paramour involves her offering to sort through his email inbox for him.
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