This effort is being spear-headed by a team based out of Redmond, Washington, which is inside the Facebook Reality Labs. This is the same division that works on Oculus products. It’s the team that works on all AR and VR products at Facebook.
Currently, it is unclear how Facebook wants to actually use this assistant with its products. But, it would likely be used on future Portal products, and other smart speakers. As well as Oculus headsets. Perhaps as a way to open apps and interact with Oculus, using your voice. Facebook is already, reportedly, in talks with some of the big smart speaker manufacturers out there, to create a smart speaker using their assistant.
This isn’t the first time that Facebook has worked on its own digital voice assistant. It released an assistant for Messenger back in 2015, called “M”. It was killed last year.
Voice assistants is the next big thing for these tech companies, and seeing as Facebook is starting to hit a wall in terms of growing the number of users it has, it needs to start looking elsewhere to continue to grow and bring in more revenue. That is where a voice assistant comes into play. Facebook has not given any other information about this assistant like the name, or when it might be available.
Source: Android Headlines; CNBC.
