Facebook videos are about to get extremely intelligent

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Facebook
Automatic tagging is coming to video.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

Facebook is upping its game with video. Soon, Facebook will be able to automatically identify friends in videos and tag them. Better yet, it’ll store this information so when you want to find that moment again, you could find the video by searching for your friend’s name and then jump straight to when they appear in frame.

According to TechCrunch, the social network announced at the F8 developer conference today that its been working on this intelligent video technology, plus more. In addition to smart, automatic tagging (which has already been a photos feature for quite some time), down the line videos might be able to recognize even static objects in videos. The team is already working on the ability to automatically caption videos as well using that same technology.

The automatic tagging dramatically helps if you’ve ever recalled a fleeting moment with a friend but couldn’t figure out which video that took place in and when. Plus with the static object recognition, being able to search for videos by their actual content shouldn’t be too far off.

Facebook hasn’t always been so kind to videos. If you’re on the social network, you’ll notice that all of your past video uploads are actually tucked away on your profile in an album under Photos. Recently, Facebook started showing more love, first with the addition of live video broadcasts to compete with Periscope. And now, videos will at least get easier to find too.

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