Facebook F8 Zuckerberg showed off

Facebook F8 Zuckerberg showed off

2019 marks Facebook's 10th F8 but looking back when it was launched in 2004 Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg pitched it as a way to get a date, wonder if he succeeded. When he opened his company's annual F8 developer conference in San Francisco recently he illustrated just how ambitious he is now, 14 years later. He said Facebook will now bring the world online, it would pioneer artificial intelligence and perfect virtual-reality. He introduced a whole series of bots that basically are designed to serve as robotic customer service reps for anyone who really wants one. He also brought onto the stage a piece of the Aquila pilotless plane which will supposedly bring wireless Internet to parts of the developing world that don't currently have it.

He said that the idea of building a plane that could stay in the air for several months at 60,000 feet, which is twice the cruising height of a commercial airliner, and also weighs less than most small cars, then he would've said you were crazy. His ambitions illustrate exactly how technology companies are no longer content with just getting people to go to their website and maybe download something, these technology oligarchs now believe their future depends on them being omnipresent in people's lives. During his address Mark Zuckerberg made several thinly veiled attacks on Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump and his policy of closing the borders and turning the United States inward, he said “I hear fearful voices talking about building walls, it takes courage to choose hope over fear”.

He also said later on after he been challenged over the fact that he had spent the past three years lobbying for more visas for foreign workers, “instead of building walls we can build bridges, instead of dividing people we can connect them. We should do it one person at a time, one connection at a time and that is why I think the work we're doing together is more important than it has ever been before”. Developers will be able to build new chat bots to work with messenger, the CNN bot was demonstrated and also the 1-800-flowers bot was also demonstrated, with this plot you can order flower deliveries with personalized messages.

Much of the buzz at the developer event was around the seemingly nerdy new product of chat bots, these bots send live, automated messages or images or video into Facebook's chat tool, messenger, which is currently used by 900 million people every month as well as 50 million businesses. For most of the people who used the bots at the event this was their first experience of interacting with artificial intelligence. This move for Facebook is as much about making money as being social, if businesses use Facebook then they make more money and Facebook can make more money from them.

Gear VR, Facebook's low-end VR goggles is part of a technology that is claimed is going to change the way we all experience the world, Facebook claims customers have currently watched 2 million hours of VR video and it already has over 50 games in production.