Grammy-winner rapper, Will.i.am, spent a majority of his time for the past six years on his i.am+ venture, creating a voice assistant, which once released into the iOS market, has the potential be more intelligent than Amazon’s, Apple’s and Google’s voice assistants.
Last week, at Sales Force Annual Dreamforce Conference, Black Eyed Peas performer and Chandrasekar Rathakrishan, the co-creator, introduced Omega’s voice assistant. He presented the voice assistant’s capability of extracting information from different smartphone apps, including calendars, news, and music.
“The Omega architecture allows you to do things for consumers that really relieves some of the pain points that we don’t really articulate because we’re just we’ve conformed to the pain points, and it’s normal now,” said Will.i.am.
Users can order the voice assistant to play songs by an artist, reel off the artist’s latest news, and discover the time of their next performance. Further, restaurants situated near-by the concert location can also be explored and dinner can be booked by making live phone calls to their personnel.
The presentation at Dreamforce showed that Alexa and Siri cannot perform some tasks as good as the released voice assistant. Although in June, Google’s voice assistant showed the impressive capability of making restaurant reservations. But Omega’s voice assistant is one-step ahead; it has the ability of calling back the user, if he is not able to make a booking at the restaurant, and gives him extra information to potentially make it happen. Although it is not really something bigger than what Google Voice Assistant can do, it still is a nice touch. And for now, Siri is also not really that good at retrieving news and Alexa can’t make a restaurant booking on your behalf.
“Alexa, I don’t wanna doo-doo on her sandwich or anything,” Will.i.am explains. “The work that they’re [Amazon] doing is great because it’s educating folks, and I’m just echoing the pain points people feel. I’m not saying anything about the product. I think what they’re doing is great, and thank the Lord, somebody is doing it in a way where you’re excited about voice. But we all feel those pain points. We all feel like, ‘Ugh,’ with the limitations of the systems, what they do and the obvious things you wished they did. And that’s what we’ve built.”
Although it is not clear yet what will be the sales of Omega in the competitive marketplace, but the 43-years old musician and tycoon highlights that i.am+ startup is all-ready. The venture intents to finally release the latest version of its sold-out earbuds with Bluetooth Buttons along with release of Omega voice assistant.
“I’m not worried about what people might think of my attempts and my failures,” Will.i.am claims of the criticism. “I’m the kind of person that gets up, like what the f…? What did I trip on? All right, cool. Note to self: there is a rope on the rug, hop over it next time.”
Will.i.am has demonstrated that innovative voice technologies don’t always have to be released by tech giants.
