Blackberry must have felt pretty left out in the area of voice enabled assistants. Plans are on-going to create their own version of Apple’s Siri which responds to voice commands. It would debut in Blackberry’s upcoming smart phone model ‘’Blackberry Passport’’and will be able to launch apps, respond to voice commands and control your devices settings.
Apple and Windows already have voice assistant called Siri and Cortana respectively, now Blackberry Has ASSISTANT. Donny Halliwell, social media marketing lead at BlackBerry, says “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.”
Blackberry hasn’t revealed a full breakdown of the app’s functionalities, however we know it will be able to control and launch apps, change device settings, and interact with Bluetooth devices. Like Windows Cortana, the Blackberry assistant will learn from your frequent actions and get smarter with every use. Blackberry literally calls their voice enabled assistant ‘’Assistant’’. That’s like naming your cat ‘’Cat’’ or your son ‘’Boy’’. Whatever happened to hot names like Siri or even Jessica!
After experiencing numerous setbacks and continuously falling revenues, Assistant is Blackberry’s attempt to catch up to its hardware competitors. However they would need to pull more rabbits out of the hat for them to crest all the waves.
Blackberry Assistant is powered by Blackberry 10.3 and will come preinstalled on the upcoming Blackberry Passport. We aren’t yet sure if it will also be available to other devices.
