There are a lot of mobile voice assistants around today - like Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa. Some of them enable you to add your own voice skills that perform any kind of custom action.

But there are a lot of restrictions as well...

Every action in Google Assistant or Alexa must have a unique name that activates it's functionality. It's hard to find such a phrase because there are a lot of other actions that already took "your" name...

To make your voice skill available for everybody you have to pass through the complicated administrative process by the assistant platform vendor. This includes clear description, testing plan and other actions. This may take up to several business days before you can launch your voice skill on at least single other device.

As a rule, there is no way to embed a voice assistant from big brands into your own application even you need to provide a single voice function for the end user (like search through the app). All vendors distribute their assistants through an own proprietary applications like Google Assistant or Siri.

Global voice assistants don't provide any tools to improve speech recognition accuracy or the quality of speech synthesis because use only their own proprietary speech-to-text and text-to-speech engines.

There are no way to add your own widgets to the vendor-specific assistants. That is why you're limited with only those UI components the assistant's app developer has provided.

Sometimes you need your assistant to launch some action on local device or in the local network. There is no way to do this until your voice skill is running in the cloud.

Why your assistant has to leave a microphone listening after each utterance while the user is in conversation with your voice skill? There are some other restrictions of voice UX that may limit your voice assistant functionality.

There is a short list of all restrictions of the "global" voice assistants. Aimybox is aimed to get rid of them and provide you a free and open solution that enables any developer to build flexible voice solution for every platform.

To start using Aimybox just jump to Quick Start article.