Facebook bought an AI startup that could turn its middling virtual assistant into a Siri killer

REUTERS/Shu Zhang

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. On Monday, 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A demo on an archived version of the Ozlo site (before Monday's acquisition was announced) shows a user typing in a query about the cheapest way to stream a particular TV show, followed by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.

The financial terms of the deal for Ozlo were not disclosed. But Facebook has made no secret of how big of a priority AI is. During the company's quarterly earnings call last week , CEO Mark Zuckerberg touted the importance of artificial intelligence to Facebook's 10-year plan.

"By joining a team that shares our values and our vision, we will be able to continue to work on building experiences powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. There's a lot more for us to explore ahead and we're excited to bring our technology to the Messenger community," Ozlo said in a message on its website announcing its acquisition by Facebook.

Facebook said in an emailed statement the the acquisition would further its goal of building " compelling experiences within Messenger that are powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning."

More@ https://www.technapping.com

Source: Business Insider

Comments

WTF is bitcoin cash and is it worth anything?

Early yesterday morning bitcoin’s blockchain forked — meaning a separate cryptocurrency was created called bitcoin cash . The way a fork works is instead of creating a totally new cryptocurrency (and blockchain) starting at block 0, a fork just creates a duplicate version that shares the same history. So all past transactions on bitcoin cash’s new blockchain are identical to bitcoin core’s blockchain, with future transactions and balances being totally independent from each other. For practical matters, all this really means is that everyone who owned bitcoin before the fork now has an identical amount of bitcoin cash that is recorded in bitcoin cash’s forked blockchain. But it’s not exactly this easy. If you control your own private keys, or hold your bitcoin in an exchange that said it would credit users’ balances with bitcoin cash, you’re fine and can access your newfound cryptocurrency right now. If you held your bitcoin with a provider like Coinbase, which said before the fork t...

Walmart expands its grocery delivery business, powered by Uber

Walmart is expanding a test of its grocery delivery service, powered by Uber, the company announced this week. The retailer is now offering grocery delivery in two new markets — Dallas and Orlando — which join Tampa and Phoenix as locations where consumers can shop online for grocery items, then opt to have them come to their home for an additional $9.95 fee. Grocery delivery has been something Walmart has experimented with for years, starting with tests in Denver and San Jose of grocery delivery using its own service and trucks. The tests involving Uber are newer, however. In June, 2016, Walmart began a trial in Phoenix, which expanded to Tampa this March. In those locations, Walmart offers grocery delivery at five local stores per market. This week’s Dallas test is larger, with 8 stores participating. In Orlando, there are four stores involved. The grocery delivery service is available via the same online grocery shopping website where customers can place their pick-up orders — a s...

OpenAI bot remains undefeated against world’s greatest Dota 2 players

Last night, OpenAI’s Dota 2 bot beat the world’s most celebrated professional players in one-on-one battles, showing just how advanced these machine learning systems are getting. The bot beat Danil “Dendi” Ishutin rather easily at The International, one of the biggest eSports events in the world, and remains undefeated against the world’s top Dota 2 players. Elon Musk’s OpenAI trained the bot by simply copying the AI and letting the two play each other for weeks on end. “We’ve coached it to learn just from playing against itself,” said OpenAI researcher Jakub Pachoki . “So we didn’t hard-code in any strategy, we didn’t have it learn from human experts, just from the very beginning, it just keeps playing against a copy of itself. It starts from complete randomness and then it makes very small improvements, and eventually it’s just pro level.” To be clear, a 1v1 battle in Dota 2 is far less complex than an actual professional battle, which includes two teams of five players completing...

Technapping

Search This Blog