Facebook buys Ozlo to boost its conversational AI efforts

Facebook has gone ahead and purchased Charles Jolley's conversational AI startup Ozlo. Jolley, formerly Head of Platform for Android at Facebook, will not be returning to the company. The Ozlo team is expected to join Facebook to work on natural language processing challenges. Ozlo launched with a consumer-facing app back in October 2016. Jolley told me at the time that the conversational AI space was rapidly consolidating (Samsung had just bought Viv) and he was happy to run a service independent of the major tech giants. With today's acquisition, Ozlo is no longer independent and the conversational AI space grows just a bit more consolidated.