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By Yasmeen Abutaleb SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc is testing a personal digital assistant called “M” within its Messenger service that can answer questions with live human help and perform tasks such as buying gifts online and booking restaurants. M is “powered by artificial intelligence that's trained and supervised by people,” David Marcus, vice president of Messaging products, wrote on his Facebook page on Wednesday. Rival services like Apple Inc's Siri, Google Inc's Google Now and Microsoft Corp's Cortana rely entirely on technology to answer questions.

By Aman Shah MUMBAI (Reuters) – Facebook Inc plans to scale up its service to offer free basic Internet on mobile phones, an executive said, after introducing the application in 17 developing countries over the past year. In a blog post released to mark the first year of the initiative, Facebook said it will open a portal allowing any mobile operator to offer the service under its Internet.org platform. Facebook currently partners with specific operators to launch the service in different countries.

Many of the tech world's top executives filled a 1,700-seat auditorium at Stanford University to commemorate David Goldberg, chief executive of SurveyMonkey. “We had 11 truly joyful years of the deepest love, happiest marriage, and truest partnership that I could imagine,” Sandberg posted on Facebook. On their way out, guests were offered Minnesota Vikings baseball caps as a reminder of the Minneapolis-born Goldberg's lighthearted nature and love of sports, according to a person who attended the service and who declined to be identified.

By Alexei Oreskovic SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Facebook Inc acquired a company that makes voice recognition technology for wearable devices and Internet- connected appliances, the latest sign of its ambition to extend its reach beyond computers and smartphones. Facebook said it acquired wit.ai on Monday, without providing a price for the deal. The 18-month old company, based in Palo Alto, California, makes software that can understand spoken words as well as written text phrased in “natural language. …