‘THE TREND IS TELEPATHY, TO CAPTURE THE ENTIRE THING AROUND YOU’
The future of Facebook is not about competing with others, but to change the way you use technology in your everyday life. Chris Cox, head of products at the world’s largest social network, tells HT about some of those likely changes.
Did Mark Zuckerberg mention to you the artificially intelligent (AI) assistant he is building? We talked about it a little bit and I was as amazed as everyone else. Mark is an incredibly capable person when it comes to taking his own challenges. So I would bet on him doing it.
Does AI have a wider role to play in Facebook’s future? It certainly does. Mark has talked about building assistive technologies that can help people use Facebook and the internet more broadly. We already use assistive technology to help people understand content in News Feed for the blind. If you could imagine everyone around you, you could tell what is there in the image. We use AI to describe what is in the photo.
Can Facebook solve problems of health and personal finance? One thing that is so unique about Facebook is connecting you with people. One fourth of the population in Mauritius is in a single group that does transactions — buying and selling things — small business owners selling clothing, auto parts. That’s the kind of example where Facebook can help in enabling how you manage money. Another example, in health, is there are groups of people who have a (physical) condition, and they can lend support to others in the group. What about Facebook’s efforts to beam internet from the sky? And the solar-enabled plane? We have a product. We are trying to build something that works. The race to deliver fast internet to everybody on the Earth is to ask what is the most important thing going on right now. We do not expect it to happen in the next year or two. We need to be ready for a lot of people in the world who are on the 2G network… The solar plane is aerodynamic and is light and is definitely not easy to make one of these things. We have something that flies.
Google is making a new messenger… Our goal in messaging is just to build the best product. We look at some of the development in messenger. We are already trying to develop a personal assistant in beta. We are not sure how people want to use that. The only way to learn is to try and build that.
What is the next phase of messaging? Last year we announced the animated graphics interchange format (GIF) support. It is now helping more and more people to communicate. We want to make (Facebook) messenger a platform, which allows developers and businesses to come together.
Is telepathy the next mode of communication? The trend for sure is sending what is happening more around you. I would direct our attention to create more 360-degree experiences, where it is just not an image or a picture anymore, but to capture the entire thing around you. That is closer to telepathy. But, if I could send you what I was imaging right now, rather than typing it on a keyboard, and would we launch it as a feature — absolutely yes. That would be an amazing feature.
Are you combining search with communication and commerce? Search has made a huge amount of progress over last year. You can search all content, which is pretty cool. Search is something where you will see a lot more from Facebook. The feature that we are working on most is to index everything. It anchors around what people are saying.
Should Google be worried? Google is building a lot of really cool stuff, too. I think Facebook, when it sees search, sees it in a different way from Google, just because of where we came from. Facebook is coming from a place where people are talking about things.
I would direct our attention to create more 360-degree experiences... If I could send you what I was imaging right now, rather than typing it on a keyboard, and would we launch it as a feature — absolutely yes. That would be an amazing feature.
CHRIS COX