Facebook takes on Amazon Alexa with speech tech

Facebook initially focused on ads. The rationale was that at the time people were typically scrolling through their feeds with the sound off, so for advertisers to get their message across they needed text to run inside their video ads. "We looked for a problem space in the speech recognition area through which we could deliver value to users," said Reena Philip, an engineering manager for Facebook's speech infrastructure group. Joining forces with the ads team, "we collaborated closely on a prototype," she said. The feature launched in the second quarter of 2016.