A video chat device by the name of Facebook Portal will be released for the home next week. This is a display device like the Amazon echo show, and the screen size will determine the price for the product; the larger variant shall be placed at US$400 and the smaller at US$300, respectively.
The privacy shutter covers the wide-angle camera of Portal, which can recognize people and trace their movements in a room using AI technology. This development was termed a “brand tax” by the employees because the shutter was developed in response to the falling trust of people on Facebook.
There is also a collaborative function with Amazon’s Alexa whereby voice commands can be made to play music, watch videos, and get news updates, among other things. The skunkworks hardware labs, also called Building 8, which is owned by Facebook, shall bring out this Portal device and has been in the news for teasing high-end technological developments like a brain-controlled computer interface.
This hardware owned by Facebook is their second hardware selling endeavor after Facebook took over Oculus for US$2 billion, a company that made VR headsets in 2014 and also developed software for a smartphone in 2013 in association with HTC, the end results of which were not palatable for the tech consumer market.
This news of the Facebook Portal’s entry into the market was planned to be announced at the F8 developer conference of Facebook that is held annually. But dates were pushed and the news came out at the last moment because the company back then was meddling with certain cases like the Cambridge Analytica data breach and Russian interference with the 2016 polls using the resources of Facebook. Let’s see how the social media giants fare in the hardware sector with this unique device.
