[DEMO Mobile] Sherpa is currently the number one voice personal assistant for Android in the Spanish-speaking world, according to the company. Sherpa for the Spanish language was launched in October 2012 and today, it makes its debut in the US market both in English and in Spanish.
Yesterday, I met with Sherpa’s founder and CEO Xabier Uribe-Etxebarria who built the algorithm that powers Sherpa, which is the result of his research in advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and semantics technologies.
Xabier Uribe-Etxebarria showed me a demo of Sherpa that was quite impressive: using complex voice commands, the system can perform a number of intelligent tasks such as booking a flight, starting the navigation app to the next meeting’s location, playing music, getting relevant information about concerts, displaying in depth information related to a public figure or paying via Paypal.
“Obama” voice command: left with Siri on iOS, right with Sherpa on Android
Most of the time, Sherpa displays the information in its own user interface in a compelling manner, using “interactive information cards”. When the system understands the requests but does not have the relevant information available from its own system, it displays a relevant Google results page .
Sherpa gather information from partners or from many online sources such as sport results, Yelp-based searches, LinkedIn profiles, translations and dictionary definitions. Additionally the application learns from the users habits.
In the demo, Sherpa is briefly tested against Siri with the word “Obama”: Sherpa displays a complete profile of president Barrack Obama while Siri, despite understanding the word’s spelling, is not able to provide any information (see photo above). At some point in the video demo, the command “book a flight from San Francisco to Boston” provides a page full of flights options, when I tired with Siri, the Apple app displayed the sentence written on screen, however, it was not able to provide any information.
The beta version of the English platform is being introduced today in San Francisco at DEMO Mobile. Sherpa is free and available starting today in the U.S. through Google Play.
The video of the demo in English and in Spanish will be displayed in this article soon.
Filed in . Read more about Android, Mobile App and Siri.