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

Posted by msmash on from the I-mean-why-not dept.

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.

6 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. "Hi Zuck" by thesjaakspoiler · · Score: 5, Interesting

    and the Zuck talking back to you. Now that would feel like a real home invasion knowing that everything you just said is being stored forever and resold to th highest bidder 15 times a day.

    1. Re:"Hi Zuck" by aaarrrgggh · · Score: 5, Funny

      I was thinking more like “Zuck Off” and it records in high fidelity.

  3. 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.

    1. Re:People are still use Facebook? by markdavis · · Score: 2

      >"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."

      Those people who DO use Facebook are ALSO spying on us who have never used it, who also don't deserve to be spied on. Members upload damn photos that include non-participants and FB figures that out and add all those third-parties in photos to their system.... creating "shadow" profiles on non-participants. FB sucks contact information from members about third-parties. They collect information from third-parties through web tracking. They scour text of their member postings for third-parties. It is like a relentless beast.

  4. Youth culture and Facebook by christopher.carver · · Score: 3, Funny

    Though my son's high school and surrounding area is such a small space, I found the term "such a Zuck" to be an interesting one among the teenagers. When I ask him what "Zuck" meant, his reply was it means perv and invading of personal space. I asked my nieces (middle and high schoolers) if they use Facebook and their replies were no, that what moms use to show off and get angry about.

    From my view, FB's runway is a short one.