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Facebook thinks that video calls are interrupted – and we bet people are willing to pay for a better experience.
On Monday, the Silicon Valley technology giant unveiled the Facebook portal, a video chat and smart speaker device that is expected to begin commercialization in November.
This is an important announcement for the company, which directly competes with Google and Amazon and represents its first foray into building consumer hardware under the Facebook brand.
The portal, available in two sizes, integrates with Facebook's chat application and is designed for video calls with friends of the user.
The portal will cost $ 199 and the largest portal Plus $ 349, and it will only be available in the United States. You can pre-order it from Monday.
The device also serves as a voice-activated home assistant and smart speaker in the vein of Amazon Echo or Google Home. The Facebook portal comes with Alexa's built-in Alexa voice assistant, allowing it to respond to voice commands to perform various tasks.
It's an interesting time for Facebook to offer a product like this. The company has been shaken in recent months by a series of scandals – including a hacking of about 50 million user accounts, announced last month, and by the Cambridge Analytica Breach this spring – and its approach to user privacy is the subject of close scrutiny.
At a rally in San Francisco with Business Insider before the launch of the portal, the company representatives quickly emphasized several privacy features of the device, from the camera cache to a total ban of 39; recording.
Best video calls
Facebook said it was launching the portal to try to solve one of the big problems with video calling: they are just not very good.
Often done on small screens of smartphone, the video calls constitute a bad approximation of the real human connection.
"We've designed them thoroughly to really deal with the current frictions of video calling and to get people to really feel together, to feel in the same space, to hang out," said Rafa Camargo, vice -president of the Facebook portal.
At rest, the portal is essentially a sophisticated digital photo frame, showing a preselected assortment of a user's photos from his Facebook feed. Unless explicitly disabled, the camera and microphone are always enabled by default, listening to the controls and monitoring to see if anyone is in the room.
The user wakes him up with a command and can call other portal owners and people via Messenger.
It has a 140-degree wide-angle camera that can automatically follow the user when he moves and cropped the image around his face, which means that he You do not have to sit perfectly in front of the screen. During the tests, the accuracy was good, but not always as fast as the movements of the subject.
The largest portal Plus screen can rotate from landscape to portrait orientation, allowing the user to adapt to individual calls or group discussions.
As a smart speaker, the portal can do whatever you want: play music, read the weather, and do other things. Facebook chose to use Alexa's Artificial Intelligence Assistant from Amazon for most tasks other than calls, rather than creating an internal virtual assistant.
Smart speakers have exploded in recent years, with Amazon Echo in the lead. But it remains to be seen whether consumers will be willing to invite Facebook's permanent microphones to their homes, given the company's history of user privacy.
Facebook representatives insisted on the privacy features of the portal, including a hardware button to disable the camera and microphone, a lens cap and a decision by the company not to save any recordings.
Facebook also said that it was not expected to display ads on the device.
So, what about the material itself?
The portal has a 10.1-inch screen with a resolution of 720p and weighs just under 3 pounds. The Portal Plus, meanwhile, has a 15.6-inch screen with a resolution of 1080p and weighs 7.4 pounds. Both have 12 megapixel cameras.
Previous reports have indicated that Facebook originally wanted to unveil the portal at the F8 developer conference in May, but put those plans on hold in the middle of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Camargo, however, categorically denied that this was the case.
The device also has potential for business video call in offices, although Facebook has announced that it will launch no integration with Workplace, the commercial version of Facebook sold by the company to organizations.
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