Get ready for Facebook to start talking to you.
The social media company is working on a voice assistant it hopes will rival Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and the Google Assistant, CNBC reported on Wednesday. This project has reportedly been in the works since the beginning of 2018.
Facebook previously had its own AI assistant called M, but it was text-based, only worked in the Messenger app, and was made available to just a few thousand users before being discontinued. Facebook told Recode in 2017 that it would eventually go into voice but that M wasn't advanced enough for that yet.
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The company looks to be nearly ready now, though. TechCrunch had previously reported that Facebook was developing a speech recognition feature called Aloha, which the outlet speculated could eventually become a voice assistant.
CNBC notes that Facebook's voice assistant could be incorporated into the Facebook Portal, its video chat smart speaker system that currently uses Amazon's Alexa.
When the Portal launched, though, some consumers expressed reluctance at allowing Facebook — with all its privacy scandals — to control a camera in their home. Facebook previously delayed the product's launch because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. With the device possibly including a full-on Facebook branded voice assistant in the future, those concerns likely won't go away anytime soon.
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