Facebook’s announced it has bought Ozlo, a start-up company that built a virtual assistant app for smartphones.
The company ‘Ozlo’ created a virtual assistant app for on-the-go conversations. It specialises in understanding text-based conversations, claiming it can understand and provide answers to questions that don’t always have a closed yes or no answer.
They created a knowledge graph containing two billion units of data to create AI technology that uses the graph to understand real-world situations, making suggestions based on this data.
Facebook has now bought the company to make the Messenger app ‘Smarter’ with the use of AI, to benefit their users.
Earlier in the year, Facebook announced the Messenger app began to use AI to make suggestions to users based on their private conversations, known as ‘Chatbots’.. This feature gave suggestions to book an Uber or send something to a friend dependant on what was spoke about.
Although most tech giants, such as Google and Amazon, are using AI with voice recognition Facebook have stuck to text based AI because the product is a conversation not a request.
Ozlo will work with Facebook to improve the scale of information that is stored and reused with artificial intelligence to give the user a better experience.
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“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 on their website.
Ozlo’s virtual assistant app can also give recipes, suggest nearby restaurants or provide show times for films. As a stand-alone, the app hasn’t been overly popular but Facebook hopes to use the qualities of the AI app to create a smarter Messenger.
