AI Helping Facebook Innovate in VR, Speech Recognition, Internet Service, Says CTO
Advances in artificial intelligence are helping Facebook create innovative virtual reality, speech recognition and connectivity technologies, said Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer in a Tuesday blog post. Computer vision, which helps machines better process, analyze and understand images, is improving…
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immersive experiences and helping to build high-quality VR headsets not leashed to a computer, he said. AI is improving speech recognition through avatars whose lips move in sync with speaking voices and enable users to issue hands-free voice commands in a VR environment, said Schroepfer. AI technologies also are contributing to Facebook's connectivity projects -- the high-altitude, solar-powered unmanned aircraft Aquila aimed at providing internet service to remote areas and the Terragraph system to provide high-speed connectivity to dense urban areas, he said. AI is helping better analyze areas so the company can effectively deploy and install connectivity equipment, he added. The company, Schroepfer said, is investing in long-term AI research that can help computers "learn, plan and reason like humans" such as describing images for individuals who are visually impaired, providing better contextual understanding and perform predictive learning. Such abilities "will add up to something like what we call common sense," which will improve interaction with humans, he said.