At Facebook F8 developer conference on Wednesday, the social network's Applied Machine Learning (AML) lab gave an update on how its artificial intelligence is giving people "superpowers."
Going forward, Facebook's going to be applying that same technology to pictures and video, the service's lifeblood. And it has the potential to make Facebook so much better — and give it a leg up on the wildly popular Google Photos, which uses artificial intelligence to help you sort your pictures.
This is clearly a little ways off. But Facebook points to that translation service as a clear example of how artificial intelligence and machine learning are already getting put to work helping people communicate. And Facebook says that its developers are doing 50 times more AI experiments now every day than they were a year ago.
Still, Facebook is thinking on a ten-year roadmap. And today's AI experiments are tomorrow's Facebook app improvements.
Here's how Facebook is showing off artificial intelligence.
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Currently, Facebook's AI is helping translate status updates, comments, and other posts — learning on the fly from the slang and vernacular that people actually use in conversation, versus the more formal speech that traditional systems can learn, the company says.
Given that Facebook claims to have 800 million non-English-speaking users, that's an important tool.
Looking forward, Facebook highlights the forthcoming ability to search images by what's in them. Search for "pictures of hamburgers" and there they are. It's similar to Google Photos.
To use Facebook's own example, you could simply say "search for a picture of five skis in the snow, with a lake in the background and trees on both sides" and boom, there it is.
Similarly, Facebook is working on systems that can analyze video in real-time and automatically tell you what's in it. Given its ongoing foray into live streaming video with Facebook Live, that could be an important technology.
Facebook also says that it's working on something called "talking images," where the AI can understand everything that's in a picture and their relations to each other, at a pixel-by-pixel level.
These "talking photos" have potentially huge implications for the blind and visually impaired. Just put your fingers over a photo, and Facebook could, in the future, literally speak out loud to tell you what's in that part of the photo.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider