French company, Snips, has announced plans to roll out its voice assistant to numerous consumer devices. The company also plans to raise capital through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO).
The tech startup developed its own digital assistant that shares the company name, Snips. It developed the voice assistant as an artificial intelligence platform with privacy as its main focus, particularly for connected devices. The company also revealed that its open source Snips SDK is available for download. A Raspberry Pi, a microphone, and a speaker can use it. The startup was pursuing the idea of creating a voice assistant that will respect the privacy of the user.
The Snips voice assistant will also be usable even without an internet connection. Additionally, the French firm is willing to work together with other companies to provide a voice assistant through their devices. This means the company will be competing with others like Samsung Electronics, Google, Amazon, and Apple who have their own digital assistants available on their own devices.
The firm also plans to introduce Snips AIR Satellites which will be the company’s portable speakers. Snips AIR Base will be the company’s smart speaker similar to what Amazon offers with the Amazon Echo. They also plan to make the speakers available in the market over the next 18 months.
The French startup is working on a marketplace through which developers will be able to come up with skills and publish them on the platform. AIR blockchain is the name of the new blockchain powering the marketplace. Blockchain platform users will be able to create training data to use towards improving voice commands for the Snips voice assistant.
Users will also be able to acquire new skills on the platform, but they will have to use “AIR tokens” in order to carry out a transaction. Snips plans to circulate the AIR tokens through an ICO, although not much has been revealed about it. The company has been around since 2013 and it managed to raise $21.3 million in funding in 2017.
It will be interesting to see how Snips stacks up against the competition especially in a market that is filled with digital assistants choices. The French company plans to appeal to the market with a focus on privacy.
