BBC is Working on Its Own Voice Assistant—Beeb

As per reports, BBC is working on its own voice assistant—Beeb.

The smart speakers might be getting more famous—but there is an issue in continuing to hold them back—the voice assistants have issues in comprehending the accents. This is especially true in Britain, which despite its small geographical location has got an extensive range of accents.

This issue is being handled by the BBC, which is working to launch its own voice assistant. As per the reports of The Guardian, BBC has said that its upcoming assistant would be able to understand the regional British accents.

The voice assistant referred to as—Beeb would not be coming with its own hardware like an Amazon Echo or a Google Home device. But it would be an extra feature for the BBC website and iPlayer app. The software would be made available to the hardware makers who want to make it a part of their products.

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For the training of the voice assistant, BBC has made its own staff, urging employees from across the nation to test the software. The corporation has also addressed public concerns regarding the commercial voice assistants—targeted advertising and security.

As per a spokesperson, people know and trust the BBC and it would be using its role as the public service innovator in technology for ensuring that all could benefit from accessing the content and gets new experiences in this new way.

The relationship between the BBC and the smart speaker makers has been under pressure. BBC needs that the users sign into their accounts when accessing content such as the radio streams on third party devices, so it could collect data about the listening habits of the users.

This was not supported by the famous Alexa app TuneIn and led to the BBC taking out its radio content from the application last year.

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