Facebook is launching universal product recognition model that uses artificial intelligence to identify consumer goods, from furniture to fast fashion to fast cars.

It’s the first step toward a future where the products in every image on its site can be identified and potentially shopped for. “We want to make anything and everything on the platform shoppable, whenever the experience feels right,” Manohar Paluri, head of Applied Computer Vision at Facebook, told The Verge. “It’s a grand vision.”

Product recognition is the first in a slew of AI-powered updates coming to its e-commerce platforms in the near future, says the company. Eventually, these will combine AI, augmented reality, and even digital assistants to create what it calls a social-first shopping experience. Its newly launched feature Shops lets small businesses set up free storefronts on Facebook and Instagram.

Fashion will be a key part of this, with the company suggesting that a future Facebook “AI fashion stylist” could offer users personalized shopping recommendations based on their wardrobe and daily suggestions for outfits tailored to the weather and their schedule.

Facebook says what makes its tools different are their scope and accuracy. The company’s new product recognition tool, GrokNet, can identify tens of thousands of different attributes in an image. These range from specific brands to things like color and size. GrokNet has already been deployed on Facebook Marketplace, where it helps users quickly list items for sale by identifying what’s in them and generating short descriptions. You might upload a photo of your couch, for example, and Marketplace will suggest listing it as “black, leather, sectional sofa.”

The company is also testing a version of this tool that’s built for businesses. When they upload photos to their page containing their own products, the AI system can automatically tag them and link to shopping pages. In building these tools, Facebook is helped by its access to users’ photos on Marketplace. GrokNet is trained on a colossal database on the order of magnitude of around 100 million images, with the majority taken from Marketplace. Facebook says this data is vital in creating a machine vision system that can identify products in challenging lighting and from dodgy angles — a part of the online shopping experience that isn’t going away.

Source- The Verge