Facebook’s 10 year forward: Social media conference focus on AI, VR

Global Business

Facebook is wrapping up its biggest event of the year, the F8 Developer conference.

The social-networking giant laid out its 10-year strategy, which includes artificial intelligence, chat bots and a heavy dose of virtual reality.

CCTV America’s Mark Niu reports.

With more than 900 million active monthly users, Facebook Messenger is the fastest growing app in the U.S. Now, it’s targeting businesses.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched Messenger Platform, which allows developers to build bots, essentially automated services that use artificial intelligence and natural language to respond to questions.

Zuckerberg showed how Messenger users can send CNN’s bot a news question and get a conversational response.

“The real challenge for businesses is how are they going to effectively use these bots to their advantage. Certainly you can do that with customer support but the language has to be correct, the timing has to be correct, the message edit on what that bot says has to be correct, so there’s a lot of pieces there that I don’t think really have been fine tuned yet,” Brian Blau, research vice president with Gartner said.

Some of that fine tuning will come from Facebook’s work in Artificial Intelligence, which it’s already using to help inform the blind what’s in a photo.

Facebook also introduced a live streaming video tab and said it’s “currently shipping.” $600 Oculus Rift headset as an unparalleled experience.

“I think virtual reality has the potential to be the most social platform, because you actually feel like you are right there with another person,” Mark Zuckerberg said.