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AI Case Study

Facebook enhances buyer and seller interactions on Marketplace through their automated AI assistant

When buyers and sellers interact on Facebook's Marketplace, they are supported by the company's chatbot, M. The automated assistant can provide information on an item's availability, suggest alternatives or translate messages. The company has disclosed that their system has been trained with a focus on recognising intent using different neural net models and entity extractors.

Industry

Technology

Internet Services Consumer

Project Overview

"Messenger allows buyers and sellers to communicate about a product directly. When chatting in Messenger, M, an automated assistant powered by AI, makes suggestions to help people communicate and get things done. For example, in a 1:1 conversation, when a seller is asked a question such as “Is the bicycle still available?” M can suggest replies like “Yes,” “No,” or “I think so.”

If the answer is no, the product is no longer available, then M may prompt the buyer with a suggestion to “Find more like this on Marketplace” with a link to a page of items similar to the one the buyer was asking about. This list is compiled using our similarity search functionality.

If M detects that a person received a message in a language that is different from his or her default language, it will offer to translate this message. Messages are translated using our neural machine translation platform, the same technology that translates posts and comments on Facebook and Instagram.

All these suggestions are automatically generated by an AI system that was trained via machine learning to recognize intent. We use different neural net models to determine the intent and whether to show a suggestion. We also use entity extractors like Duckling to identify things like dates, times, and locations. For some suggestions, we use additional neural net models to rank different suggestions to ensure the most relevant options are surfaced (like translation, stickers, or replies). M also learns and becomes more personalized over time, so if you interact with one suggestion more regularity, M might surface it more. If you use another less (or not at all), M will adapt accordingly. This entire process is automated and powered by artificial intelligence."

Reported Results

"Marketplace benefits from the use of AI to serve both buyers and sellers in a more seamless way."

Technology

"All these suggestions are automatically generated by an AI system that was trained via machine learning to recognize intent. We use different neural net models to determine the intent and whether to show a suggestion. We also use entity extractors like Duckling to identify things like dates, times, and locations. For some suggestions, we use additional neural net models to rank different suggestions to ensure the most relevant options are surfaced (like translation, stickers, or replies)."

Function

Sales

Sales Operations

Background

"Whether someone is discovering an item to buy, listing a product to sell, or communicating with a buyer or seller, AI is behind the scenes making the experience better. In addition to the product index and content retrieval systems, which leverage our AI-based computer vision and natural language processing (NLP) platforms, we recently launched some new features that make the process simpler for both buyers and sellers."

Benefits

Data

Online conversations on Facebook's Messenger

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