Facebook Latest AI Features – Facebook recently revealed how Artificial Intelligence technology is sprinting in its path of evolution. Facebook’s Marketplace platform which has completed 2 years in October. Statistics say that one out of three Facebook users in the United States use it every month. In addition to this, more than one million users around the globe are also being part of the bandwagon. Around 450 million people worldwide visit Buy and Sell groups on Facebook per month, by shifting a large share of this activity to a central marketplace, Facebook is able to manage better, police, and greatly capitalize upon it.

About Marketplace platform

Facebook Latest AI Features – The marketplace is a digital space where users can buy, sell, and trade their products with other people in the area. Marketplace allows you to search for items in the nearby area, search “For Sale” items by categories and/or location. Also customize bids, view all the previous and current transaction and messages under “Your Items” area, and message buyers and sellers to arrange the transactions.

Note: Facebook plays no role in managing or facilitating any transactions. Users have to work out the transactional section on their own. All transactions take place outside the Facebook app and are not the legal responsibility of the app.

Who can use Facebook’s Marketplace?

Currently, Facebook’s Marketplace is available on Android and iOS user aged 18+ in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. A desktop version and access for other nationalities will be available in the coming months.

AI–powered Facebook’s Marketplace Platform

AI has powered Marketplace to make it more efficient and help sellers connect with more potential buyers. They did it by improving the quality of the photos automatically and translating Messenger conversation. The newer features have been introduced to the platform are – Price range suggestions and auto-categorization.

At Marketplace, if someone is discovering an item to buy, listing a product to sell. Or communicating with buyer or seller, AI is powering the platform in making the experience better. Along with the content retrieval system and product index, Facebook has launched more features to make the process simpler for both buyer and seller.

For the buyer, Marketplace also uses computer vision and searches to recommend similar products. And also, the option to have listings translated into preferred languages using machine translation.

But for the seller, Marketplace has tools that simplify the process of creating product listings by automatically suggesting the relevant category or even the pricing. It also uses tools that automatically enhance the lighting in images.

Facebook Latest AI Features – Developing Product Index

Marketplace seamlessly interacts with AI from the moment they arrive to buy or sell. Starting from the very first search, results are presented by the content retrieval system, coupled with a detailed index, tagged with every product. As the only text presented in the listings was price and description, it was important to build in context from photos as well as the text for the listings. With the implementation, it was seen a nearly 100% increase in the consumer engagement along with the listings since the beginning of the product indexing system.

To accomplish this, Facebook developed a multimodal ranking system that included Lumos, image understanding platform and DeepText, text understanding system.

Facebook Latest AI Features – Improving the modal scale with AI

To work upon millions of products at speed a sophisticated system was required for an online marketplace. And to develop such system, it took 4 million products to train neutral network model on both text and images. To process that huge volume i.e. quickly accessing the images and suggest the categories according to the relevancy in real time, Facebook introduced distributed training across multiple machines at once.

Effective buyer and seller interaction

Messenger allows buyers and sellers to have an effective communication about a product directly. ‘M’ an automated assistant powered by AI is present in Messenger to make suggestions to help people communicate and get tasks done.

‘M’ suggests automated replies to the buyer and seller. And if the answer is no, then ‘M’ automatically lists that the product is not available. On the buyer’s side, ‘M’ prompts the buyer with related suggestions as well. ‘M’ suggestions are automatically generated by AI system that is put forward via machine learning.

Marketplace expanding on the foundation of AI

Equipped with a faster retrieval system, better product index, and the capability to understand context and relevance, Marketplace platform serves both buyers and sellers in a seamless way.

But this is not the end. Facebook is currently testing new features that allow buyers to take a picture of any product from the real world. And then search it for visually similar products in the Marketplace. In the end, people can use their computer vision platform to recommend products similar to their search options. Artificial Intelligence or machine learning may not perfectly understand our style preferences. But will be enough to retrieve content similar to it.

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