News about Facebook’s plans to create a human-powered virtual assistant program leaked in July, when sources speaking to The Information described a personal assistant-like service that was referred to internally as “Moneypenny,” after the James Bond character. Today, Facebook has finally revealed more information about the program, which it is now simply calling M, a new feature that will be baked into Facebook Messenger.

“M is a personal digital assistant inside of Messenger that completes tasks and finds information on your behalf,” Facebook’s David Marcus wrote in an announcement on the site. “It’s powered by artificial intelligence that’s trained and supervised by people.”

“Unlike other AI-based services in the market,” he continued, “M can actually complete tasks on your behalf. It can purchase items, get gifts delivered to your loved ones, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments and way more.”

So basically, it is like giving Siri free reign to run your life, but with the peace of mind of knowing that somewhere out there a real person is monitoring those actions…for now anyway. Facebook has apparently hired real humans to work behind the scenes to answer questions for M and perform the tasks users assign to it. Meanwhile, Facebook’s machine learning technology will be monitoring what they do so it can train M to eventually work without too much human intervention.

You know, just like Skynet.

While Facebook has officially announced M today, it will likely be a long time before the average user gets a chance to try it out, as the service won’t be rolled out anytime soon.

“This is early in the journey to build M into an at-scale service,” Marcus explained. “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.”

M would be yet another feature in the growing list of additions Facebook has made to Messenger since it was split off from the core Facebook app. One day Messenger may finally live out its dream of being the only app you have on your phone.

Image courtesy of Facebook