BlackBerry gets a ‘voice’ with its new digital assistant, BlackBerry Assistant

BlackBerry has been late to the voice command party but finally they made it with their new digital assistant, called BlackBerry Assistant (notice how everything needs to have ‘BlackBerry’ in it, e.g BlackBerry World, BlackBerry Protect, BlackBerry Messenger, etc?).

The new BlackBerry Assistant will debut on the latest BlackBerry Passport phone and will be very simple, only working to do simple tasks like organizing emails, send messages and even set reminders. A teaser review of the BlackBerry Passport, whose release date is unknown, can be read here.

However, it is not as advanced as Google’s Now, Microsoft’s Cortana or Apple’s Siri voice command systems and we can only understand why when the actual phone, the BlackBerry Passport, is released to test the service.

 

In a  blog post, BlackBerry’s Donni Halliwell wrote, “It is voice activated when I need it to be, and helps manage simple tasks on my device from searching my email and calendar, finding out what’s trending on Twitter, to sending trivia night invitations. The more I use it, the more it learns and adapts to me. The more I speak with it, the more tuned-in to my queries it gets.”

It is a step in the right direction, not only for able-bodied users but also for those with disabilities who can not handle the everyday tasks you need to do on a  smartphone. It increases accessibility so we’ll applaud BlackBerry for that.

We’ll be looking out for both the BlackBerry Passport smartphone and its BlackBerry Assistant feature.

Image Credits: PC World, Inside BlackBerry