Facebook is staffing up its 'Conversational AI' team as it prepares to take on Amazon's Alexa and the Google Assistant (FB)

• Facebook is bulking up its team working to build an AI assistant to rival Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri.
• The company is hiring for a number of technical roles as it attempts to build out its expertise in the area.
• Facebook's previous attempt to build an AI assistant, M, never reached the point of mainstream adoption.
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Facebook is quietly bulking up its team working to develop an artificial-intelligence assistant that could challenge Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and the Google Assistant.

The Silicon Valley social-networking giant has a bevy of open job postings on its website for its "Conversational AI" group in a bid to attract technical talent with expertise in machine language, natural language understanding, and other fields necessary to build an advanced AI chatbot.

The listings indicate that Facebook is pushing ahead with its plans to enter the space and take on its far-better-established rivals, even after its previous attempts to build an AI assistant have failed to take off. The postings also offer a new window into what the $566 billion company is envisioning. 

"The Conversational AI group built M, Messenger's in-thread assistant that proactively recommends stickers, polls, restaurants, movie tickets and so much more to more than 1.3 billion people that use Facebook Messenger every month," one job listing reads. "This journey is only 1% finished, and assistant features within Messenger today represent only initial steps in terms of what we expect a truly social assistant to be able to do in the years ahead."

A word on M

Facebook first dipped a toe into the world of AI assistants with M — a chatbot that lived inside Messenger and that acted almost like a concierge. It wasn't purely AI-powered however and relied on humans behind the scenes to help with queries. It never saw a wide-scale launch and, instead, was available to only a small pool of around 2,000 people.

In January 2018, it was shuttered, and M morphed into a feature that lived inside users' Messenger conversations to suggest stickers, recommendations, and so on — a far cry from the more sophisticated voice-activated AI assistants from Amazon, Google, and other rivals.

When Facebook launched its Portal video-calling device in October 2018, it shipped with Amazon's Alexa built in, rather than an in-house AI assistant — but its existence hinted that it was a space in which Facebook was still interested.

Then in April, CNBC reported that Facebook had been developing an unannounced voice assistant since early 2018. Facebook subsequently confirmed its interest in the space, saying in a short statement to the press: "We are working to develop voice and AI assistant technologies that may work across our family of AR/VR products including Portal, Oculus, and future products."

More than six months later, the company is still working away. It is hiring a research scientist with a "strong background in developing Dialog systems, a strong knowledge of ML, NLP and neural networks," a machine-learning engineer, and a software-engineering manager, all to work in the conversational AI group. "We are developing technologies to help connect people to what matters most by recognizing and fulfilling their intent in a natural way," one listing reads.

The new hires will join an array of workers at Facebook already building the "Facebook Assistant," including product designers, data-operations linguists, machine-learning engineers, voice-user-interface designers, and product marketers, according to LinkedIn profiles. The effort is being led at Facebook by Ira Snyder, who was previously the general manager of research at Facebook Reality Labs, its augmented-reality and virtual-reality research hub.

The company's rival products have already been on the market for years, and it may face an uphill battle to break into the market.

Facebook declined to comment on this story.

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