NEW YORK: Yahoo is working on a competitor to Google Now, Siri and Cortana. Codenamed Index, the company aims to have a pilot version of the app completed in the coming months. The project is being led by Jeff Bonfire and Peter Monaco, two high level Yahoo executives.
According to the source Business Insider interviewed, the company believes that its competitive advantage against established players like Google and Apple is that it has a “much older relationship with its users.”
“Gmail users have only had their accounts for 10 years,” said the source to Business Insider reporter Nicholas Carlson. “Yahoo has many 20 year old accounts. Back then people used to email themselves a lot store things. To surface that kind of data usefully is exciting.”
Mayer hinted that Yahoo was working on a personal assistant type app during the company’s earnings call on Tuesday. She talked shortly about potential functionality, saying that the app could, for instance, recognize that a search for “JFK” that came from a person on route to an airport meant that they were more interested in airplane gates and departure times than the 35th U.S. President.
As the publication notes, although Yahoo saw its search volume hit a five year high, it will likely face a difficult battle to get users to adopt the service.
