Facebook raised $14 million to enhance Messenger and build its personal assistant
To help Messenger build its personal assistant, Facebook has raised $14 million from a range of investors with a hope to transform its Messenger a high speed personal assistant of the users.
Greylock is one of this startup’s investors and being a part of this acquisition it is going to shutter its existing app alongside its enterprise APIs ( Application Programming Interface ).
What’s the thing that attracted Facebook?
Ozlo, a Palo Alto-based artificial intelligence startup attracted Facebook to aquire it, so that a more elaborate virtual assistant for its users is built.
The very startup specialises in understanding text-based conversations and claims to understand and respond to the probabilistic assertions of truth. Probabilistic assertions of truth are the questions that don’t necessarily have yes or no answers.
Clear description of startup’s functionality:
To understand the process more clearly, you can visit the company’s website where through a short demo Ozlo’s AI assistant has shown how it answers a question. In this demo. AI assistant answers the question whether or not a restaurant is “group friendly”.
The assistant’s answer is based on pulling and understanding multiple reviews.
According to a Facebook’s spokesperson the majority of the Ozlo team will join Messenger in Facebook’s offices in Menlo Park California or in Seattle, Wash.
An ambiguity:
Though Facebook is going to buy startup’s workforce and technology that gives a hope that the technology will be folded into Messenger’s existing AI efforts but it remains unclear if that includes Messenger’s already existing virtual assistant.
However according to a female spokesperson they are going to work only with Messenger to continue their work with artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Earlier this year, Messenger started rolling out recommendations from its AI assistant. These recommendations meant users might be urged to order an Uber or pay a friend based on the conversation they already have.
Facebook’s Strategy:
Facebook has just featured its improvements around building a text-based assistant while Apple, Google and Amazon are busy in building voice-controlled AI assistants.
Strategically Facebook focuses on text-based AI because a voice conversation requires a third step that text conversations do not, and Chudnovsky (Head of product at Facebook Messenger) dislikes to teach the world things that they themselves can’t do well.
Why Facebook avoids AI voice-controlled AI?
Instead of indulging into the world of voicd recognition, acquisition of the startup to enhance Messenger’s speed and building up its personal assistant is a great step. The company is well aware of the fact that if they stepped into a realm where they are not fully aware of the ways people will not let them advance.
As Chudnovsky says:
“Otherwise we’re going to be in the world where people very quickly realize certain things that we don’t do well yet and then they may not give us another try.”
