Facebook - Empty head
Another smart speaker that badly needs a brain
It looks like Facebook is joining the ever more crowded smart speaker bandwagon, but without a decent brain inside the box, it may as well be a paperweight. One possibility is for the device to use Cortana as it comes from one of the few companies that do not compete directly with Facebook: Microsoft. The device looks like it will be using a 15-inch screen from LG and will be manufactured by Pegatron but beyond that there are very few details. We suspect that Facebook may be trying to take a slightly different tack here because the smart speaker market is already very crowded, Facebook has no brain of its own to install in the box and it is more focused on community than smart home.
Facebook’s main objective in life is to bring its users closer together using its apps and to give them a sense of community. While this all sounds great for users, the reality is that they will end up spending more time inside Facebook’s fledging ecosystem, generating more traffic and thereby increasing Facebook’s ability to make money from them. Hence, we suspect that this device may be aimed more at making it easier for Facebook friends to spend time with each other by voice, video, messages or even images.
To earn a place on the increasingly crowded countertop of consumers, it is going to need voice functionality of some description. Facebook M, which is Facebook’s own digital assistant is hopelessly inadequate to fulfil this role, meaning that Facebook will have to get one from somewhere else. Top of the list for this is Cortana which, while not the sharpest tool in the box, it is the only one whose owner is not competing directly with Facebook.
We have seen Microsoft and Facebook creeping closer together over the last few years and this is a collaboration that could make some sense. With a bit of tinkering on Microsoft’s part, Cortana could be taught how to deal with the majority of the tasks that users ask smart speakers to perform. This work is probably already going as Microsoft may already be working on a smart speaker of its own. Combining this with the screen and Bing would give the device a reasonable shot at doing a decent job of answering queries. This is just another example of how badly Facebook needs to bring its AI up to a level at which it can compete on a level playing field with Google and would also help Facebook deal with the objectionable content problem that it has on its platform as its current answer to this is to throw more humans at the problem.
This has to be Facebook’s number one strategic priority and the progress displayed at F8 on image and video recognition was somewhat encouraging. We remain quite cautious with regards to Facebook’s outlook for this year as neither its video or gaming offerings are mature enough to bring the company back to high growth in 2017. This combined with requirement to really improve its AI to compete with the other digital ecosystems leads us to still prefer Baidu, Tencent and Microsoft.
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