Facebook first announced its virtual assistant, simply named 'M,' back in 2015. It ran inside Facebook Messenger, and was apparently trained and supervised by real people. It started off as a limited test to residents of San Francisco, then Facebook rolled it out more widely last year.

The few people that used M will be disappointed, because Facebook is now shutting it down. The contractors who worked on it will be offered other positions, the company told The Verge. In a statement, Facebook said, "We launched this project to learn what people needed and expected of an assistant, and we learned a lot. We’re taking these useful insights to power other AI projects at Facebook. We continue to be very pleased with the performance of M suggestions in Messenger, powered by our learnings from this experiment."

M will continue to function until January 19, so you have until then to say your goodbyes. If you find yourself wishing to talk to a virtual assistant in a chat app, Allo is still an option.

Source: The Verge