Jordan O'BrienMozilla ditched its Firefox OS when it failed to take off on smartphones and tablets but now the company is reviving the project for IoT devices.
With this latest move Mozilla has revealed four new projects for Firefox OS to focus on; including an intelligent ‘personal user agent’, a smart home initiative, a crowdsourced network based on sensors and a voice interface for IoT devices.
Project Vaani is the company’s main focus for Firefox OS, as it goes head to head with Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana. The company describes it as ‘an IoT enabler package to developers, device makers and users who want to add a voice interface to their devices in a flexible and customisable way’.
Unlike Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, Mozilla is looking for the community’s contribution to bring Project Link to life. That means just about any developer can get involved with making Project Link smarter. The company has not yet identified how it intends to do that however.
Project Vaani is set to complement Project Smart Home, which will act as a ‘middle ground’ between solutions like Apple’s HomeKit and DIY solutions like Raspberry Pi. The company says that by ‘combining modular, affordable hardware with easy-to-use rules, Smart Home empowers people to solve unique everyday problems in new and creative ways’.
Project Link is described by Mozilla as ‘our personal user agent that understands your preferences for how you want to interact with the world of devices in your home, and automate your connected world for you.’
Mozilla hopes that one day it will be able to control connected devices without the user needing to interact with anything. If you’ve ever watched the film Her, then it appears Mozilla is attempting to do something very similar. A personal assistant that knows what the user wants before the user.
All these projects have something in common thus far – a competitor. The same can be said of Project Sensor Web. This project is designed to create a network of sensors that can supply crowdsourced data that will be accessible to everyone.
Sound familiar? That’s because it’s essentially an open-sourced version of IBM’s Watson. If you’re left with any doubt that Mozilla is aiming its project directly at IBM, which recently acquired the Weather Company, then maybe the fact that the first crowd-sourced sensor network will focus on air pollution could dispel any doubts.
All these projects will be open for tinkering by Mozilla’s vast developer community.
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