Roger Fingas
Facebook on Wednesday confirmed that it's working on its own voice assistant, carving out a space among competitors like Apple's Siri and Amazon Alexa.
"We are working to develop voice and AI assistant technologies that may work across our family of AR/VR products including Portal, Oculus and future products," a spokesperson told Reuters. Voice commands can be especially important for AR and VR headsets, since they're typically not used in combination with a keyboard, mouse, or touchscreen.
Portal is actually the company's video call hardware. Adding a voice assistant would naturally turn it into a video-capable smartspeaker akin to the Google Home Hub or Amazon Echo Show.
The assistant was first exposed earlier today by CNBC, which said that it's being crafted by a Redmond, Wash., team typically assigned to long-term projects. Development began in early 2018, and Facebook has allegedly been contacting vendors in the smartspeaker supply chain, perhaps pointing to a dedicated product.
Any Facebook-branded smartspeaker would face an uphill battle. Amazon and Google are by far the dominant players in the market — Apple's HomePod, backed by billions of dollars, is estimated to have claimed just 1.6% of the market in the December quarter. Facebook has also been wracked by scandals, which may only add to suspicions about the privacy of smartspeakers.
Chip Loder
Mike Wuerthele
Malcolm Owen
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
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20 Comments
What can possibly go wrong?
Yea like anyone would trust FB listening to them.
The press release has already been written "Due to an unforeseen technical error we've been listening to what you've been saying 24/7. We estimate it has affected only a small number of user, roughly 800 million. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused."
LOL. April 1st has already come and gone.
I hate crime novels they already know the ending too, especially who the bad guy is !