Another AI Voice Assistant may come to the town very soon. This time from social media giant Facebook to rival the Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple’s Siri. Facebook is working in the project from early 2018 as reported by the CNBC.
A team based out of Redmond, Washington has been trying to develop this new AI. The effort is being headed by Ira Snyder, head of the companies AR/VR division. It is still unclear how Facebook wants to implement this new AI voice assistant but it could be used in Facebook’s Portal video chat smart speaker, the Oculus headset or other upcoming future products.
Facebook already has some experience of working on a virtual assistant. Back in 2015, they introduced “M” Facebook text-based smart assistant to improve the conversation in messenger and to give some recommendation like where to go for what to eat, etc. But Facebook shut down the project in January last year as it failed to impress people.
This new assistant from Facebook will face tough competition from the market leader Amazon and Google. Currently, Amazon and Google hold 67{7612e6fcd35940926eef5d7bd8f0522b7c050df4dcd15667744be5e37897c111} and 30{7612e6fcd35940926eef5d7bd8f0522b7c050df4dcd15667744be5e37897c111} of the smart speaker market in the US respectively.
Now voice searches are growing rapidly with nearly 40{7612e6fcd35940926eef5d7bd8f0522b7c050df4dcd15667744be5e37897c111} annual growth. Now Facebook also wants to join the race in this going market with their voice assistant. It should also be noted that last November Facebook began selling their Portal video chat device which comes with Alexa for Complex task along with “Hey Portal” for normal work.
Now the question is, will you use this new voice assistant from Facebook? We have seen that Facebook doesn’t have a good track record when comes to customer privacy security. And as now we know from Amazon Alexa’s case that people listen to our chat with a voice assistant, will people show confidence in Facebook? Let me know in the comments below.