BlackBerry unveils its own virtual assistant

By Silky Malhotra

BlackBerry has announced its voice controlled virtual assistant, simply called BlackBerry Assistant, and will be launched on the upcoming Passport phone.

BlackBerry's voice assistant will be able to handle the same tasks that Siri, Cortana and Google Now can do. It is voice-activated, and can help you open apps, set reminders and change settings, send messages and tweets. The voice assistant will grow familiar with the way you do things over a period of time.

BlackBerry Assistant also uses Passport's physical keyboard, letting you perform actions by typing directly from the home screen, which is similar to Palm's Just Type implementation in webOS, that allows you to post tweets, send messages, search the web, and more without ever going into a specific app.

In a post on the company’s official blog, social media marketing lead Donny Halliwell stated, "If I’m driving and I ask it to read my latest email message to me, it does so. I can then ask it to ‘Mark Unread’ without having to enter the BlackBerry Hub. If I’m in a meeting and I type ‘Remind me to follow up with Matt about our whiteboard session,’ it builds me a reminder note that I can save without leaving the Assistant,” says Halliwell. He adds, "you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how accurate BlackBerry Assistant is at recognizing your requests."

As of now BlackBerry is well behind rival voice assistants from Google Now, Microsoft Cortana and Apple's Siri. All the companies are focusing on their voice assistants in an effort to create an inter-connected eco-system, in which you can link your smartphone to your smartwatch and even to your home. BlackBerry hasn't revealed its voice assistant capabilities as yet and not given a timeframe for its availability aside from the fact that it'll be part of BlackBerry 10.3 operating system in its upcoming Passport smartphone.

digit.in