On 12th and 13th of April 2016, Facebook held its F8 conference in San Francisco. There are a lot of changes that are to make our Facebook experience better, however, we also step a little bit outside of the platform.

Facebook want us to communicate in the easiest manner. This is why the facilitations are as follows:

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

One of the things we all anticipate is the application of AI in our communication.
Joaquin Quiñonera Candela – Facebook’s director of Applied Machine Learning – showed us what is bound to change:

• Automatic captions for what people say in videos – no matter the language and place, the communication will simply become… simple.
• Identification of people appearing in clips or videos, in order to tag them – this is not all as there will be a possibility to associate individuals with specific time in the video.

Social Virtual Reality (VR)

Apple Watch and other gadgets… watch out! Because you are about to get a good run for your money. He claims that virtual reality and augmented reality will be more available and the conventional-looking pair of glasses will be a thing of the past. Facebook bought Oculus VR in 2014 and made VR one of its priorities for the following years.

As Mark Zuckerberg said:

VR makes you feel like you are right there with another person. This is the kind of social experience you can have on any existing platform today.

If you are interested in the trend, dig deeper and read our previous blog post.

React Native for Windows

During the conference it was announced that Microsoft and Facebook partnered once again. This cooperation led React Native, which is a JavaScript code library developed by Facebook and Instagram, to get Universal Windows Platform (UWP) support.

What does it mean?

Eric Rozell, Microsoft Developer Experience software engineer, explained:

The new UWP support extends the reach of these native apps to a new market of 270 million active Windows 10 devices, and the opportunity to reach beyond mobile devices, to PCs, and even the Xbox One and HoloLens.

These are just a few things that were introduced during the conference. Facebook, like other companies, wants its contribution to be noticed in the AI market. These solutions are no longer experimental projects, but products that we can all make use of.