A Battle Royale Of Digital Assistants: The Big 5

Facebook is the latest tech titan to try and bring a consumer-focused digital assistant to the largely uninterested populace. M is a largely text-based hybrid assistant that can rely on human knowledge when need be to help answer queries that are a little bit more complicated and may require a human touch.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook now all have their own digital assistants that they’ve been pumping tons of cash into. There are lots of smaller companies also looking to break into this space (which I’ll soon look at separately) but these tech titans clearly have the upper hand at the moment.

To me, it’s a little unclear if consumers are as excited for the prospect of a digital assistant as tech companies, hungry for new sources of data and revenue, are. In a lot of ways most of these services struggle in similar areas where the technology isn’t quite where it needs to be, but each of these assistants definitely have their own flavor with some being clearly being better than others.