Facebook bought an AI startup that could turn its middling virtual assistant into a Siri killer
Deal comes as company stresses the importance AI will play going forward
By Alexei Oreskovic
Facebook’s virtual assistant, which goes by the name of M, hasn’t quite delivered on the promise of a life-changing artificial intelligence product.
But Facebook isn’t giving up. The company announced its acquisition of a small, AI startup that will be folded into Facebook’s messaging app. Ozlo, which was founded four years ago and is based in Palo Alto, California, describes itself as “an index of knowledge about the real world.”
In practice, that means a technology that lets users ask questions about everything from restaurants to movie schedules, which the AI-based system can quickly answer thanks to “a knowledge graph containing over 2 billion entities.”
A demo on an archived version of the Ozlo site (before Monday’s acquisition was announced) shows a user typing in a query about the cheapest way to stream a particular TV show, followed by Ozlo’s response, in natural language, proposing various viewing options.
This kind of virtual assistant feature, similar to Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant, is something Facebook has sought to do with its M assistant. Facebook has integrated some automated M capabilities into the Messenger app. But a the full-fledged M virtual assistant is still only available to a very limited set of test users, and Facebook has acknowledged many of its capabilities are handled by a team of human “trainers” rather than true AI.