Scarlett Johansson, Facebook MoneyPenny and Corporate Productivity - Digits - WSJ

Check the full article for a summary of MoneyPenny, Facebook's "smart virtual assistant"

"Butterfield doesn’t plan on making Slackbot a sentient artificial intelligence like in the movie, but rather infusing the Q&A tool with natural language processing and machine learning so that it can do mundane, time-consuming tasks like scheduling meetings that take up a lot of employees’ time and attention.

The company, which last week turned two, just hired its first data scientist, and it’s looking to invest in artificial intelligence. Butterfield acknowledges the challenge, saying his company will need partners with major AI capability.

“Apple spent billions of dollars on Siri and worked on it for a very long time with hundreds of engineers and a huge dataset of voices – and it’s f–ing idiotic. Siri is nearly useless,” he says. Apple declined comment."

Scarlett Johansson, Facebook MoneyPenny and Corporate Productivity - Digits - WSJ