Earlier today, we published a first look at what we believed to be a Yahoo!-made competitor to voice assistants like Google Now and Siri. The video, sent to us by an anonymous tipster along with screenshots showed what looked to be a very impressive app with an implementation similar to Facebook's Chat Heads, whereby a Y! icon would constantly float on the home screen waiting to be activated.

This evening, TechCrunch learned through a source "familiar with Yahoo's internal projects" that the app wasn't real, implying the video was nothing more than a really nice concept demo.

The most recent news is that the app is actually real, but it isn't made by Yahoo. Instead, it's an app made by Robin Labs, a natural language processing startup which has created a "white-label platform for custom voice assistants," to follow up on its own personal assistant app released last year.

So while the app wasn't being worked on directly by Yahoo, it was crafted during ongoing discussions between the two companies, and the video was apparently handed over to Yahoo! before being leaked.

Ilya Eckstein, Co-founder and CEO of Robin Labs confirmed this narrative to us, indicating that "the video captures our software during a test drive."

So, while the app may not be an official Yahoo! ware, it turns out that it is at least a real, functional product based on Robin's platform.

via TechCrunch