Facebook on Monday said that it has acquired Ozlo, a start-up that built a virtual assistant app for Android and iOS. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Ozlo launched last year, making its assistant available outside of other apps with assistants, including Alphabet's Google Allo, Facebook's Messenger, and Microsoft's Skype. Ozlo can give you recipes, point to nearby restaurants and show movie showtimes, among other things. But the app hasn't become extremely popular -- on Android the app has 500-1,000 installs. Messenger's many end users can already talk with many chatbots in the app, and Facebook wants to get even more businesses using the technology to talk with customers.

Today I'd like to cover Intelligent Assistants. Perhaps this is cheating a bit, because it's a post I originally published on Medium on June 22nd. Then I had played with my first two home assistants (Amazon Echo I bought for my mom and a Google Home I received as a gift) and realised the potential these devices have not only in the home, but very soon also in the car and office. This year, 35.6 million Americans will use a voice-activated assistant at least once a month, doubling last year's figure, forecasts eMarketer. I don't normally like to predict things, but here's one: Home assistants are here to stay.

Facebook has bought artificial intelligence startup Ozlo to help build its Messenger service into a chatty virtual assistant that answers your questions. Ozlo specialises in understanding text-based conversations, and claims its software can understand and answer complex questions that require more than a simple'yes' or'no' answer. For instance, its AI assistant can answer a question about whether or not a restaurant is'group friendly' based on data from multiple reviews. Facebook is buying both Ozlo's technology and workforce, who will likely join Messenger's existing AI team. Facebook has bought artificial intelligence startup Ozlo to help build its Messenger service into a chatty virtual assistant that answers your questions.

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.

Facebook has acquired Ozlo, a Palo Alto-based artificial intelligence startup, to help Messenger build out a more elaborate virtual assistant for users. Ozlo specializes in understanding text-based conversations, and claims it can understand and provide answers to questions that don't necessarily have simple yes or no answers -- what Ozlo calls "probabilistic assertions of truth." On the company's website, for example, a short demo shows its AI assistant answering a question about whether or not a restaurant is "group friendly" based on pulling and understanding multiple reviews. Ozlo's website claims it has 30 employees, and a Facebook spokesperson says the "majority of the team" will be joining Messenger in Facebook's offices in either Menlo Park, Calif., or Seattle, Wash. Facebook is buying the company's technology and workforce, and it sounds as though Ozlo's technology will fold into Messenger's existing AI efforts, though it's unclear if that includes Messenger's existing virtual assistant, M. "They're just going to be working with [Messenger] to continue their work with artificial intelligence and machine learning," a spokesperson said.

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.

John McCarthy coined the term Artificial Intelligence in 1955. Since then, the AI industry at large has seen dramatic ups and downs -- progress and promise mixed with disappointment and disillusion. But now with the convergence of Megatrends on massive data, lightning fast processing speeds, and renewed competitive fever from the American MAFIA (Microsoft, Alphabet, Facebook, IBM, Amazon), AI is poised to cause disruption on a scale that could surpass the Internet itself. As we prepare for a wave of AI first companies (@sundarpichai) and AI natives (Ryan Hoover), every person in the innovation economy will need to understand how AI will (or will not) change their industry and their lives. These titans shape the conversation and have the most ability to move the entire AI industry.

For many, the first real interaction they will have with AI is through the personal assistants on their phones. Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana have already proved themselves in the market place, but while such virtual assistants have a clear advantage in that they come built in to people's phones, they have competition from independents. Ozlo, for one, launched on iOS last October. Its focus thus far has been on finding people restaurants, bars, and recipes by analyzing data from sources like TripAdvisor, FourSquare, and Yelp, among others, and it is looking to expand. In 2017, Ozlo is being made available to third-party developers so that they can build their own versions of Ozlo.

It's become clear that the algorithms Facebook and Google designed to deliver news to their users have failed. But while fake news is a headache for those tech giants right now, the underlying research question--whether and how machines tell truth from lies on the internet--is one that will persist as long as the world wide web stays an open forum. Facebook and Google's sizable machine learning divisions have created algorithms that effectively surface information that users want to see. But they've been unable to actually understand or vet that info--and in fact, experts across the tech industry say it's unrealistic to expect any AI or machine learning algorithm to do this task well. All our best efforts so far are built on research in natural language processing, which teaches AI to read a piece of text, understand the concepts within, and provide insight about its meaning. "Modern machine learning for natural language processing is able to do things like translate from one language to another, because everything it needs to know is in the sentence its processing," says Ian Goodfellow, a researcher at OpenAI.