American band Black Eyed Pea’s frontman Will.i.Am might be the latest entrant into the tech race, with news the artist is to release his own voice assistant.
Will.i.Am’s start-up I.am debuted the bot at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco earlier this week, according to The AFR.
Taking the stage at Dreamforce, the I.am founder said: “We’ve been building this for six years… I’m in it day-to-day and it’s the reason why for eight years the Black Eyed Peas and myself haven’t made music.
“A lot of people told us not to go to Dreamforce and do a live demo. They said to make a video and like lip sync. I don’t lip sync, I have to do it live,” he said.
“You can use Omega to make conversational computing cross-domainable. With other services you’re just siloed.”
According to the I.am website, Omega is: “An Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) platform built to be contextual and proactive, providing businesses with the tools to develop human-like conversational experiences.
“The Omega platform is AN infrastructure, a device and is channel-agnostic, offering voice, text, and rich accessible customer experiences”.
The Omega will be up against the likes of Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, a market which is predicted to be the next big thing for advertisers.
Speaking at the event, Will.i.Am said: “Right now on your phone music does not talk to maps and maps doesn’t talk to the calendar… they’re all siloed islands and they all need to work together when you’re having a conversation and moving away from swiping.
“In our system, I can say ‘play Beyonce [then] tell me what’s going on with her’ because it’s all built that way from the ground up,” he said.
“I can say, ‘when is her next show’… I can say ‘find sushi restaurants there’ and book the reservation all from the central point of ‘play Beyonce’ because the context remains.”
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