INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Facebook has bought Bloomsbury AI, a British company specializing in natural language processing
The Bloomsbury team will join Facebook's London office, where they'll add their skills to the social network's growing artificial
intelligence division."The Bloomsbury team has built a leading expertise in machine reading and understanding unstructured documents in
natural language in order to answer any question," Facebook said in a statement on its Academics page."Their expertise will strengthen
suggests that chatbots are more likely to be the reason Mark Zuckerberg opened his wallet.Facebook unveiled chatbots for Messenger in 2016,
as a way for people to communicate more easily with businesses, and by the end of the year 34,000 bots were chatting away with
customers.Last year the company released a framework called ParlAI (parley, get it) to help developers improve their chatbots' verbal
skills, helping make those thousands of bots' replies faster and less robotic.It also conducted an infamous experiment that involved two
chatbots speaking to one another
After a while, their conversations evolved into something that looked nonsensical to human observers but were actually a more efficient
evolution of English."I can can I I everything else," said one bot
not because the bots were colluding to take over the world, but because the researchers simply weren't interested in the direction the study
had taken.Bloomsbury's technology could help bots read websites, brochures and other documents, and answer questions based on what they've
learned quickly and, most importantly, in a way that makes sense.
