‘BlackBerry Assistant’ Revealed to Take on Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana [PIC]

BlackBerry continues to tout the advanced design, features and coolness factor of its upcoming BlackBerry Passport, a square-shaped smartphone coming soon.

The company’s official blog today unveiled BlackBerry Assistant, the company’s answer to other virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana.

The BlackBerry Assistant will be able to learn and adapt to the user and can do things like search the web, make calendar appointments, send messages and more. Below is just one shared example of what the company says it can do:

This past week, we experienced some severe weather here in Waterloo. We briefly lost power and I needed to find my way around the house in the dark. I asked the BlackBerry Assistant to “Turn on the flashlight”. The flashlight app turned on (as expected) and on the screen, within the app, a switch to turn it off appeared. I opted to go the voice route, though, and when I was done said, “Turn off the flashlight”.

The assistant is also able to change settings for notifications, so by saying “Phone calls only, please” only calls will come through and nothing else, which is actually pretty handy.

Despite confidently mentioning how “you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how accurate BlackBerry Assistant is at recognizing your requests,” no video demo was posted to back up these claims.

The company is doing a great job of spinning and hyping up its new device, as a recent post also stated how previews of the BlackBerry Passport were said to “ignite media and consumer interest” based on media previews and feedback by consumers in article comments.

Let’s wait and see how well the Passport fares when it hits the open market—the numbers won’t lie (that is if sales numbers are shared and not just items shipped).

Update: forgot to mention BlackBerry’s stock is down 10% as of writing due to yesterday’s major announcement by Apple and IBM to dominate the enterprise.