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Facebook is Working on a Voice Assistant To Rival Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri, Report Says (cnbc.com)

Facebook is working on a voice assistant to rival the likes of Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri and the Google Assistant, CNBC reported Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: The tech company has been working on this new initiative since early 2018. The effort is coming out of the company's augmented reality and virtual reality group, a division that works on hardware, including the company's virtual reality Oculus headsets. A team based out of Redmond, Washington, has been spearheading the effort to build the new AI assistant, according to two former Facebook employees who left the company in recent months. The effort is being lead by Ira Snyder, director of AR/VR and Facebook Assistant. That team has been contacting vendors in the smart speaker supply chain, according to two people familiar. It's unclear how exactly Facebook envisions people using the assistant, but it could potentially be used on the company's Portal video chat smart speakers, the Oculus headsets or other future projects.

2 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Nah... by samdu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...I'm good. Stay over there, Facebook, and I'll stay over here and everything will be fine.

  2. People are still use Facebook? by johnsie · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you're still using Facebook, despite all the information and bad news that has already been released about them, then they deserve to be spied on. Seriously people need to be getting off their systems and blocking the embedded Facebook images (often hosted on Facebook's servers) and tracking scripts that are on third party sites. It's nothing more than a data mining tool that is also used by psychopaths to manipulate people.