Yahoo Looking to Take On Cortana, Google Now, and Siri

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer during the company's earnings call on Tuesday hinted that the firm might compete with voice-based virtual assistants such as Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri and Google's Google Now in the future with its own search-based mobile offering. She also announced that Yahoo's search volume notably touched a five-year high due to its deal with Mozilla for its Firefox default search.

Mayer, referring to how she expects mobile search to transform, gave an example of searching the term 'JFK' on mobile while moving towards the airport and the search showing up the boarding pass and the airport gate number instead of simply popping up 'John F. Kennedy' Wikipedia page, reports Business Insider.

Speaking about Cortana, Google Now, and Siri, Mayer said, "Those products are really heavily differentiated both from each other as well as from the historic legacy products, and so that's really where we see an opportunity to play in something that's mobile. And as it moves to, for example, the watch, and on to television screens and video we think that there's a really interesting place to play there, to help people make better sense of the content they already have access to, content in their mail, using more context to actually provide higher quality results."

Elaborating on how she wants mobile search to be personalised, pulling in context for the user, Mayer added, "And that's really where we're excited to invest and that's why we've worked on things like Aviate, like Search My World and we've been making investments there and we'd like to do more with that and that's what I'm referring to, the classic web search has a different cost profile than that future oriented mobile search that's more personal."

It is worth mentioning that Yahoo has already taken a step towards offering a virtual assistant product with its Aviate launcher, which learns user's behaviour and shows up content and apps most relevant to the user at that point of time in the day. Of course, the app has a long way to reach the likes of Siri, Google Now and Cortana.

Recent reports also indicate the firm will unveil a messaging app later this quarter, a video-focused product that will take on popular rivals like Skype and Snapchat. The unnamed messaging app is said to be the first product under CEO Marissa Mayer.