Facebook has been developing a personal assistant for users who use his social network for some time, and recently it was revealed that his plans cannot be fulfilled so easily. Those at Facebook indirectly admitted that they cannot develop their own personal assistant based on artificial intelligence, so they decided to buy a company called Ozlo, which develops artificial intelligence systems.
Facebook bought the Ozlo company because it specialized in the development of an artificial intelligence system that can understand text-based conversations. Ozlo's representatives brag about the fact that their artificial intelligence is capable of providing answers to complex questions, and Facebook needs exactly that to be successful in giving users what they want.
Facebook definitely tested Ozlo's technologies before buying the company and it seems that it needs this system to develop its own personal assistant. Ozlo's artificial intelligence can answer questions written by users in Facebook Messenger conversations with a personal assistant, so Facebook won't necessarily have to implement a voice command recognition system.
Facebook is developing a competitor for Siri and Google Assistant
Facebook knows that Siri and Google Assistant are very popular and that more and more people use personal assistants on their smartphones every day. Apple and Google have managed to convince the world that they can make their lives easier thanks to these personal assistants, and now Facebook is trying to enter the fight with the two giants in an attempt to attract more people to its social network.
Facebook is developing a modular smartphone and a personal assistant based on Ozlo's technologies would be extremely useful for the American company. The iPhone and Google smartphones have integrated personal assistants Siri and Google Assistant, and if Facebook is serious about its intentions to develop a smartphone, then it will definitely need its own personal assistant, not Google's.
"They're just going to be working with [Messenger] to continue their work with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Until we nail [text] we don't want to go into a world where we teach people what we cannot do well. 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."
Facebook will implement this personal assistant first in Messenger, the Ozlo team will be integrated into the team developing the messaging platform. Facebook has already launched a personal assistant called M, but it is very limited in functionality and is not able to do everything that the artificial intelligence of the Ozlo company is able to offer, so the purchase will prove to be beneficial in the long term.
