Facebook will also try to chat with robots after t

After several attempts at chat robots, Facebook is also developing intelligent voice assistants

Facebook is also developing intelligent voice carbon: carbon black, graphite, carbon hollow balls, carbon fiber assistants

according to CNBC, the R & D team is led by IRA Snyder, head of oculus' research team. The team works in Redmond, Washington, where oculus also works. The intelligent voice assistant project has been carried out since the beginning of 2018

facebook has been increasing its investment in VR since it acquired oculus in 2013. Zuckerberg once said at the oculus connect 5 conference in 2018 that Facebook has invested more than $500million in hardware since 2016. However, Facebook's progress in VR hardware has not been very good, and its sales are not as good as HTC vive and Sony's PS VR. In May, 2018, oculus research team changed its name to Facebook reality lab

at the end of last year, Facebook restructured another experimental hardware development department, building 8, and transferred some experimental projects of Building 8 to Facebook reality lab. Building 8 is also renamed portal, and now it is mainly responsible for the development of consumer hardware. At present, the only products publicly launched are Portal Video Chat hardware

portal diagram/cnet

portal video chat hardware was launched in October 2018. It is divided into two versions according to the size of the display screen. The larger version of the display screen is called portal plus. The core function of portal is that it can use face recognition technology to automatically adjust the focal segment of the camera according to the distance from the user to the display screen, so that the human body can be displayed more clearly, and follow the person who enters the lens, and the chat volume will also be automatically adjusted according to the distance

in addition to the basic video chat function, portal also supports playing music through spotify and Pandora, and playing videos from Facebook watch video streaming platform. The display screen is smaller. According to the analysis, it looks very similar to Amazon and Google's echo show with screen smart speaker and Google home hub. One of the functions of these two products is to allow users to have video chat

the verge said that the new intelligent voice assistant project may be jointly developed by the portal department and Facebook reality lab. some of the work is low-quality and simple repetitive work because of IRA. Snyder also has a position in portal

this is not the first time Facebook has developed an intelligent assistant project. It has been trying to do something related to chat Robots before

in August 2015, Facebook launched a text chat robot m on Messenger, which mainly cooperates with businesses to provide users with ordering and recommendation of life services such as restaurants and cakes. Due to the unsatisfactory number of users, Facebook went offline in January 2018 and closed the project. Facebook explained that M is an experimental project to help them understand what users need and expect from smart assistants, which will be applied to other AI projects of Facebook in the future

in addition to m, in June 2016, Facebook also launched a text chat robot deep text, which has the same function as M. it also provides some recommendation or reservation services related to life services, such as weather forecast, Uber reservation, accommodation reservation, etc. Almost at the same time, Facebook launched a third-party platform that can access the Messenger chat robot platform to help these enterprise accounts automatically reply to messages sent by users

people familiar with the matter said that the new intelligent voice assistant project started after the closure of the M personal assistant project

caption: rshallon visualhunt