Facebook is planning its own voice assistant as it looks to increase competition with Siri and Alexa. According to a report from CNBC, Facebook has been working on this AI assistant since early 2018. It comes after the company tried and failed to launch a Siri competitor in 2015.
Facebook’s virtual assistant development team is being led by Ira Snyder, who also serves as the company’s director of augmented and reality. That team is also responsible for Facebook’s various hardware initiatives.
There are questions about how Facebook would make a virtual assistant available to users, seeing that it doesn’t currently offer a smartphone of any sort. There are a few possibilities that CNBC outlines, including integration into Oculus headsets, as well as its own smart speakers.
CNBC’s report mentions that Facebook “has been contacting vendors in the smart speaker supply chain” as it develops its own assistant. Given that the AR/VR team spearheading the assistant’s development also works on hardware, this seems like a possible solution.
