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.

Building on its promise to give the entrenched a run for their money, conversational AI startup Ozlo is making its meticulously crafted knowledge layer available for purchase today. Ozlo's new suite of APIs that includes tools for both expressing knowledge and understanding language will help to democratize the creation of conversational AI assistants. In the spirit of the expert systems of the 1980's, knowledge graphs are about leveraging massive fact databases to build intelligent AI tools. The problem is that intelligence isn't just a matter of knowing facts. Though no truly intelligent AI has emerged from well organized information, Google, Microsoft and others have made use of the knowledge graph to reduce the barriers to getting desired information -- think of the search widgets that tell you Barack Obama's age so you don't have to click on Wikipedia.

Artificial intelligence startup Ozlo thinks it has a solution for situations where virtual assistants fail in their responses: Getting the bots to ask questions back. Ozlo is launching a trio of software packages for other companies to enhance the virtual assistants they build. They're aimed at making those assistants more sophisticated, including getting them to ask clarifying questions when they don't understand a user request. Current virtual assistants, meaning conversational apps and bots like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, "have this problem with being very brittle," Ozlo CEO Charles Jolley told Recode. He's referring to those moments when Siri says, "I didn't quite get that," or where Google Assistant says, "Sorry, I don't know how to do that yet," without addressing what part of the question the virtual assistants don't understand.

The society of intelligent agents now has a new member. His name is Ozlo, from the Palo Alto, California-based company of the same name. According to co-founder and CEO Charles Jolley, he's the only independent intelligent agent left, now that Samsung has scooped up Viv. But the key differentiator, Jolley told me, is that Ozlo is "the only assistant that can link together competing sources of information." As an example, Jolley recalled that he wanted "some steak and live music" while on a recent trip to Las Vegas.

On the heels of Samsung's acquisition of Viv just a week ago, a new AI assistant has risen into the spotlight and is jockeying to fill the shoes of its now well-known rival. Ozlo, the Greylock- and Jerry Yang-backed independent entrant to the personal assistant race, is launching today on iOS and the web in an effort to give stalwarts like Siri, Alexa and Cortana a run for their money. The new personal assistant promises early adopters a good memory, a brain full of knowledge, and an independent soul -- everything you could hope for in your new binary friend. When I sat down with Charles Jolley, CEO of Ozlo and previous head of platform for Facebook on Android, the two of us immediately had a nice laugh about the repetitive female names for assistants in the marketplace right now -- Ozlo, by name alone, is already something different. That said, a name is one thing; the more important question is whether Ozlo is useful and doesn't make its users want to throw their phone against a wall after use.

Last month, Facebook's "Trending" tab featured Megyn Kelly as a topic, displaying hoax news items claiming she had been fired by Fox News. Many critics pointed out that the mistake occurred shortly after the social network decided to shed the editorial team in charge of overseeing trending topics. The company had gone almost entirely algorithmic with the feature, and the move had almost immediately failed. A Quartz postmortem ascribed the incident to an "inmates running the asylum" scenario. The algorithm that surfaced the news based its selection on Facebook users' activity, and for reasons of policy or practice human overseers had neglected to correct the mistake.

After birthing a virtual assistant that knows a little of everything, SRI International is working on ones that know a lot about just one thing. The nonprofit research center is arguably best known in the tech world for spinning off Siri, whose virtual assistant tech Apple acquired in 2010. SRI also incubated Tempo, an AI-driven calendar app that Salesforce bought last year. Now, SRI believes it can infuse AI into even more settings--shopping, banking, travel, business-to-business applications, and so on--allowing for deeply knowledgeable chatbots that know how to carry a conversation. The goal, says William Mark, SRI's president of information and computing services, is to have assistants that are much better at specific tasks than a general-interest assistant like Siri.

Nearly every big tech company now offers a digital assistant powered by artificial intelligence. Apple has Siri, Facebook has M, Microsoft has Cortana, Amazon has Alexa, and Google has, well, Google. The success of these services is heavily dependent on the mountains of data they have at their disposal -- along with massive amounts of computing power to crunch that data, understand user queries, and respond in real time. This reality raises an obvious question: how can startups without their own server farms and massive customer bases hope to compete? Companies like Hound and Viv want to build standalone apps that consumers will use in place of the assistants built into their smartphones.

What do you get when you take the former head of platform at Facebook, a former Mozilla engineer, veterans of other companies like Microsoft and Amazon, and an interest in building an assistive chatbot that stands apart from competitors in the space? The answer is Ozlo, a chatbot in the form of a cute, blue critter that answers questions from users with cards that contain deep links to relevant apps and websites. The company built around the service – headed up by CEO Charles Jolley, the former Facebook platform head – has offices in Palo Alto and Seattle and a workforce of 28. MUST READ: iPhone 7: Seriously, this phone sounds boring to you? And it landed a 14 million investment in May from Greylock and AME Cloud Ventures partly because Ozlo represents something a little different in a world that's starting to move from apps to more voice interaction with our devices.