Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer hinted about developing a voice-based virtual assistant, which can compete with similar services like Cortana, Siri and Google Now.
Citing an example of searching for "JFK" en route to the airport, Meyer said she expected the page to show her airline boarding past and airplane’s gate number, rather than simply producing the John F. Kennedy Wikipedia page.
Referring to services like Siri and Cortana, Mayer said: "Those products are really heavily differentiated both from each other as well as from the historic legacy products, and so that’s really where we see an opportunity to play in something that’s mobile.
"And as it moves to, for example, the watch, and on to television screens and video we think that there’s a really interesting place to play there, to help people make better sense of the content they already have access to, content in their mail, using more context to actually provide higher quality results."
Yahoo‘s search volume in the first quarter reached a five-year high due to its deal with Mozilla and its search partnership with Microsoft.
Buoyed by this, Yahoo is planning to boost its search technology by introducing personal assistant products.
The company has reportedly taken steps to boost its search with the acquisition of intelligent home screen start-up Aviate and introduced ‘Aviate’ Android home screen app, which gathers information from user’s behaviour and shows up content and apps most relevant to the them.
