Last Wednesday, Google held its keynote address at I/O 2016, where all of Google's new products for the year were announced. Google placed particular emphasis on Google Assistant, its task-completion service that leverages the exceptional voice recognition capabilities of the Mountain View company.
Viv was also unveiled by the creators of Siri as another chatbot earlier this month, and now Microsoft doesn't want to be left behind in this newly launched race to launch its own service. The Redmond-based company has posted a search for a professional to assist them with this task.
The idea is to use this Bing bot to respond to users through platforms like Skype, Messenger, SMS, WhatsApp, and Telegram. The job posting for an engineer to join the project team describes the bot as follows:
The agent does what a human assistant would: it directly helps with the user's needs by automatically completing tasks. Users speak to the agent in natural language, and the agent responds in kind to gather all the necessary information. Once ready, it automatically performs the task for the user by connecting them to the services.
For example, the user would ask "make me a reservation for an Italian restaurant tonight," and the agent would respond with "for how many people?"; finally, they would confirm the reservation and display the information of the restaurant that the user has selected.
Microsoft has already made significant progress , having announced its Bot Framework in March, a platform for developers to create and integrate intelligent bots into their apps.
We'll see where it all ends up and whether Microsoft can reach the level of Google Assistant , a service that also leverages the company's experience in search engines, something vital to be able to respond to the user with a natural conversation.