Will.i.am backed startup presented Omega, their smart assistant at the recently finished Dreamforce conference. Omega is set to compete with Alexa and Google Assistant although heavy geared towards music fans: in the presentation the assistant was shown playing tracks at request, before providing information about the artist playing and any upcoming gigs or live performances. I mean, seems like Spotify for smart assistants. Given this music focus we can safely predict that is likely to find Omega built in in bluetooth wireless headphones. Speaking of which Microsoft unveiled several Surface devices among which are the Surface Headphones with Cortana (obviously) and automatic pause and play. The headphones are set to be available later this year. With Omega smart assistant and Microsoft own Surface headphones is the tell tale of companies capitalizing from voice technology, or at least fighting for a place in the consumers heart.

You see my friends, this voice space that might have been called a fad, it nothing like it. Look at the different angles of the ones coming to the space are and draw your own conclusions.

I’m Mari, your host for VoiceFirst Weekly daily briefing, you can find me on Twitter as @voicefirstlabs and on Instagram as @voicefirstweekly./ You have a great day and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

Last week or earlier this week, the creator of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners Lee presented a project he has been working on in stealth mode: Solid, an open source project according to its author: “with the goal to restore the power and agency of individuals on the web”, is based in Linked Data and web annotation ontology. Anyways, why am I talking about this? In the FastCompany interview Lee referred to a voice assistant with the same principles, free, open source and decentralized. Its code name is Charlie, focusing on how people will own their own data. And goes along to explain how Charlie could be more useful on areas like health records, children’s school events or financial records. I talked here in an episode about smart assistant that are alternatives to the most popular ones backed by one of the big companies, among which was Snips, a smart assistant which differentiator is privacy built in.

Whether Tim Berners-Lee offering of a decentralized web will catch up or not time will tell. But also developers will tell.  Tim said that “Developers have always had a certain amount of revolutionary spirit” and this can be the opportunity to start something new and participate on a bigger mission for developers with an appeal for freedom and take control back from the web from corporations.

There are several aspects to be noted from the announcement, most of them are out of the scope of this podcast, for the topic we care, it’s really telling that when Tim decided to create a new platform for the web, it had voice from that start on in the strategy.

The intent is world domination

Said the WWW creator in a interview for FastCompany.

It seems that I keep missing Mondays the past two weekends! I have been traveling and it’s harder to find a quite place to record when you are traveling. As always, share this episodes and have a nice day. I’ll talk to you all tomorrow!