Facebook has acquired Ozlo, an intelligent agent, to power its Messenger platform. The terms of the acquisition have not been publicized yet. It is believed that Facebook’s leveraging of Ozlo might not be limited to just Messenger. Ozlo is a Paul Alto, California-based company. Since the time Samsung dropped the curtains on Viv, Ozlo is perhaps the only remaining intelligent agent.

Ozlo may bolster or even replace M, Facebook’s homegrown intelligent agent to catapult Messenger. M is still work-in-progress for Facebook. Ozlo has the capability to connect sources of information that are competitive in nature. It is, therefore, not merely an intelligent search engine, but rather an intelligent agent capable of synthesizing data collected from different online sources.

 
Team Ozlo stated in an official release, “Now, we're ready to take the next step in our journey with Messenger. By joining a team that shares our values and our vision, we will be able to continue to work on building experiences powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. There's a lot more for us to explore ahead and we're excited to bring our technology to the Messenger community.”

Even if the primary idea behind acquiring Ozlo was to boost Messenger, its ability to synthesize knowledge can help Facebook prevent and control fake news which has been a pain point for the social media platform particularly during the recent US Presidential elections. The extremely large user base and extensive news feed of Facebook makes detection and management of fake news a huge challenge. Ozlo’s intelligence can be of help here as its judgments are based on knowledge synthesis and not just AI filters.

Beyond that, Facebook might possibly use Ozlo as a superior interface for interactions between computers and humans in TVs, cars, and other electronic media. And this scenario is very likely to materialize as players such as Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Amazon, and Google have similar goals for their intelligent agents.

The knowledge graph that the team of Ozlo has developed contains more than 2 billion entities along with a wonderfully robust AI technology that utilizes data to comprehend the subtleties of the real world.