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Yahoo rumored to wage war on Google Now, Siri, and Cortana with its own personal assistant, "Index"

By Peter K.

Updated: Apr 24, 2015, 4:17 AM

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Yahoo is reportedly prepping a rival to Google Now, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft's Cortana. Code-named Index, it is believed to be a personal voice assistant, which could put Yahoo back in the search game (currently dominated by the likes of Google). The existence of Index was hinted by Yahoo's own CEO, Marissa Mayer, who spilled the beans and claimed that Yahoo intends to wage war on the existing trinity of mobile assistants.

"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," CEO Marissa Mayer said.

Yahoo is no stranger to mobile apps. You might recall that it acquired Aviate, a context-aware third-party Android launcher, more than a year ago. Still, going head-on against the major players on the voice-assistant scene will certainly prove to be a cumbersome task for Yahoo, which will have to come up with something clever if it really wants to establish its codenamed "Index" as a viable alternative to Google Now, Cortana, and Siri. According to Business Insider, a pilot version of the assistant might pop up sometime in Q2 as a smartphone app.

source: Business Insider via Android Police