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Facebook Messenger’s intelligent assistant M can now serve up recipe suggestions from the Food Network. This means if you’re in a conversation with a friend and someone mentions a recipe, M might suggest Find Recipes. Tap the suggestion and the Food Network chat extension will open to let you search more than 60,000 recipes.
You can search for recipes based on the name of a favorite chef, a key ingredient, a dish’s name, or other criteria.
The news was announced by Messenger head of product Stan Chudnovsky on stage at MB 2017, a gathering of tech giants and startups working in AI and bots that’s taking place July 11-12 at Fort Mason in San Francisco.
The Food Network addition for intelligent assistant M is only the second since third-party integrations and Delivery.com came to Messenger in April.
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“Trying to provide value to people in the thread based on what might be relevant to them is another way in which we can connect people, and businesses as well, and that’s what the Food Network announcement is really about,” Chudnovsky said.
Last month, M learned when to suggest video calls or save content and how to speak Spanish. The Discover tab for featured bots also launched last month, as did chat extensions for Spotify and Ticketmaster.
M makes suggestions by analyzing text used in conversations to recognize when you may want to do something like create a calendar event, hail an Uber, or make peer-to-peer payments. If someone asks “Where are you?,” M detects the intent and suggests that you share your location. Suggestions from M first debuted in April.
If you’re not excited about hearing the intelligent assistant’s suggestions, they can be disabled in Messenger settings by tapping your profile photo in the top left corner and choosing M Settings.
Chudnovsky also announced today that Messenger will begin a worldwide rollout of ads for the Messenger home screen.
The launch of Food Network M suggestion follows the launch of the Food Network visual skill for Amazon’s Echo Show, which gives you the ability to search for DIY cooking videos and recipes.
