Firefox makers eye new ‘voice browser’: They’ve even built an Alexa prototype
Video: How Mozilla plans to win back Firefox users.
Developers at Firefox maker Mozilla are working on a new app dubbed ‘Scout’, which aims to bring voice to the web and offer a voice assistant along the lines of Amazon Alexa or Apple’s Siri.
Spotted by ZDNet sister site CNET, Mozilla revealed the Scout project in a session description for a talk at its All Hands 2018 meeting in San Francisco this week.
The session covering Technical Stack Requirements For A Voice Browser suggests how the Scout app might work.
“Hey Scout, read me the article about polar bears,” it says. The Scout app allows Mozilla to “start to explore browsing and consuming content with voice”, it adds.
The description doesn’t offer much beyond that, except that Mozilla is exploring the components it would need to create a voice platform.
Given Mozilla’s strong stance on privacy, a voice assistant from the non-profit might offer a more privacy-friendly, AI-powered voice assistant than say, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or Microsoft’s Cortana.
Only last month Mozilla called out Amazon over privacy concerns it had with the Alexa-powered Echo Dot Kids Edition, posting a petition on its website demanding Amazon explain what it does with data it collects from kids’ smart speakers.
A voice browser could also help Mozilla add a new avenue to stay engaged with users as it tries to win back those it lost to Chrome over the years.
Mozilla reveals a little more in other sessions focused on voice, which point to early prototypes that use Amazon Alexa, somehow involve iOS, and integrate with Pocket, the Mozilla-owned read-it-later app that recently was integrated with Firefox 60 to generate sponsored stories in new tabs.
Mozilla revealed Scout’s connection to Alexa in a session about its recent AR/VR browser Firefox Reality.
The session, called Emerging: Mixed Reality and Voice Experiences, describes Scout as “a multi-platform tool for listening to web content” that provides the first steps to “audio-enabled vision of the web”.
“[T]he session will present Scout, a multi-platform tool for listening to web content: first steps towards a multi-platform audio-enable vision of the web. Our Alexa and iOS prototypes feature Pocket as a content source. We’ll discuss our iterative approach and collaborations with our colleagues at Pocket.”
The Exploration and Discovery for Voice Assistants session also mentions Scout, and notes that Mozilla is pursuing a “speech and language assistant”.
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