We have recently heard that Facebook might release its own voice assistant like Alexa or Siri in the future. According to some sources, Facebook’s augmented and virtual reality team is led by Ira Snyder, who has been developing an AI voice ever since 2018.
The team has gotten into contact with smart speaker vendors, probably in order to make a partnership that would lead to devices that could be powered by this new assistant.
Facebook is all about Oculus and Portal
If we are to take into account what a spokesman told the media, Facebook wants to develop its assistant for its Oculus headsets, its Portal smart display and for future AR/VR devices.
He stated that they are working right now hard to develop a voice and AI assistant, that could make its way across the family of AR/VR products, such as Oculus and Portal.
Facebook tried before to develop AI assistants, but none of them could beat Siri or Alexa. They launched the M assistant for Messenger back in 2015, which did not work out.
Users could trigger commands for the display, by simply saying “Hey Portal”. However, the device still needs the help of Alexa for some more complicated tasks.
The project is still at the beginning, so we will have to wait a bit until we get a voice assistant that’s going to beat its rivals on the market.
If this will really happen, we cannot but only wish it good luck, because the market is already crowded.
According to some sources, Echo from Amazon is expected to get 63.3% of the smart speaker users in 2019, and Google Home 31%.
Nora Reynolds is a major in biology and a minor in Biological Basis of Behavior, writing about science in general. She also likes to try new gadgets and sports about the AI new era.
