Will I Am's startup wants to rival Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant

Will I Am's startup wants to rival Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant

Will I Am’s tech startup I.am+ is making a voice assistant to rival Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant and just raised $117m to finance the project.

According to Reuters, the sum includes an $89m round that closed in March, from a group of backers (including Salesforce’s investment arm). This way Will I Am built his company up to 300+ people and started working on a voice-assistant called Omega, which is already being used by German telco Deutsche Telekom for a customer-support chatbot.

Will I Am commented:

I wanted to create something that allows us to do many things. There’s so much you can do with a voice platform. One of those things is handling hundreds of thousands of customers’ inquiries about their data plans simultaneously. If it can do that, your imagination’s the limit.


Actually, at least for now, Amazon, Google and Apple seem mainly interested in the consumer market, so the direct rival for Omega may be something like Microsoft’s Cortana instead.