BBC working on voice assistant for streaming service and interactive television

The British public broadcaster BBC is working on voice assistant Beeb to navigate the broadcaster’s website and in vod service iPlayer. The voice assistant is developed internally and is intended for software use only; a smart speaker is not yet going to make the broadcaster.

According to the British newspaper The Guardian, the voice assistant’s focus is on searching for programs and ‘interacting with online services’. The broadcaster promises that the voice assistant will be able to understand British accents, something that other voice assistants may have difficulty with. To understand those accents, the public broadcaster this week asks its employees to record their voices and be sure that the software understands their voices.

In addition to being available on the BBC website, the voice assistant should also be accessible via the iPlayer app on smart TVs, and the software will be made available to manufacturers to integrate the service into their devices. The assistant can be called up with the command ‘Beeb’, an informal name of the broadcaster. IPlayer is the BBC’s streaming service, which allows British residents to watch television programs in high quality. Formally, the service is not free and a TV license is required to view the images.

According to The Guardian, it is not the intention that Beeb will compete with Siri or Google Assistant, for example; the team and available resources are too small for that. According to the newspaper, the assistant wants to be able to collect more data about the users. A BBC spokesperson also says that this will give the broadcaster more ‘freedom to experiment with new programmes, features and experiences’. According to The Guardian, the assistant should be released next year.