Facebook Is Developing A Voice AI To Compete With Alexa And Siri

In the upcoming time, it is possible that Facebook might launch its very own voice assistant to compete with Siri and Alexa. As CNBC reports, since 2018, the company’s AR and VR team with Ira Snyder as the leader has been working on a voice AI.

The team has reportedly contacted smart speaker merchandisers, presumably to establish partnerships leading to new devices powered by a smart assistant.

A Facebook spokesperson told Reuters that at the moment, the giant social network is mainly focusing on the development of assistants for its Portal smart display, its Oculus headsets and other upcoming AR/VR devices.

The spokesperson said:

Portal is a smart display product which focuses on messaging tasks. The device was launched in November 2018. At the moment, instead of using a Facebook-owned voice assistant, it deploys Amazon Alexa from Amazon.

Previously, Facebook has had experience working on AI assistants. However, none of them could become Alexa or Siri’s competitor. Back it 2015, It introduced Messenger’s M assistant which was axed last year. The assistant depended heavily on human input heavily and was just a costly experiment for the company.  On the company’s smart display, users can start commands by saying “Hey Portal.” But for more complex tasks, it still needs help from Alexa.

Because the project is just beginning to take form, we will have to wait for quite a bit to see whether the upcoming voice assistant of Facebook could compete with those from its rivals.

And the better question here is: will people put their trust on Facebook with its new smart voice assistant after all privacy-related scandals the company has been going through.