Inside Facebook's DeepText: Social network is using AI to help understand language on the site

Facebook has announced a deep-learning algorithm that can understand posts and messages with "near-human accuracy," according to the company's blog. While it's still in testing, DeepText can already analyse the textual content of several thousands posts in more than 20 different languages every second in order to understand what people mean when they post on Facebook. The company said that DeepText would improve people's experience of Facebook by delivering more of the content that they want to see while filtering out spam. But the deep-learning algorithm is even smarter than that – DeepText has the potential to integrate intelligent search functions into Facebook in real time. One example Facebook gives is two people having a Messenger conversation about meeting up.