One more spin around the sun and Qwhery is celebrating its first birthday. 2020 hasn’t turned out how we expected it to and just like many, we’ve had to think differently about our products and what’s important.

We started Qwhery with a focus on voice technology, connecting your smart speakers and voice assistants to your Towns, Cities and Regions and the services and information that they provide. When we were faced with the pandemic, we decided to try and do something for everyone by bringing COVID-19 related case data to you via SMS text messaging, Facebook Messenger, Alexa and Google Assistant. Today, you can register for free COVID-19 alerts for any Health Region in Canada or County in the United States. We’ve enabled our Alexa Skill, Q11 to also provide anyone with the same information. Google Assistant is on the way.

The pandemic doesn’t look like it’s ending soon, but we’re now able to refocus on what we started one year ago – building an innovative platform to connect authoritative City data to voice skills and voice assistants, so that anyone can get relevant information immediately by just asking their devices, using conversational AI.

What’s Next?

We’re looking forward to bringing “Where do I go to vote?” to Alexa and Google Assistant for #Election2020. As the temperature begins to drop, we’re also starting to think about how we can integrate live snow plow information into the voice channel – as in, “Where’s my plow?”, or, “What are the roads like for my drive to work?” 

“Alexa, report a {pothole, streetlight outage, garbage, graffiti}” based on your devices location, whether you’re at home or on the go is something we’ve also been designing, which we think is going to be a really interesting way to communicate with your City and the folks responsible for keeping infrastructure maintained.

Qwhery’s first year has been an exciting and unusual one, and we’re hoping that our next one will be just as interesting. Can’t wait to meet you, and enable voice technology for your organization.

Stay Safe!

Matt Pietryszyn
Voice Strategy Lead, Founder
Qwhery Inc

 

Cake Shield image provided by Top It – https://news.yahoo.com/cake-shield-aims-birthdays-safer-195354937.html