Siri’s Creators Reveal Amazing New AI Assistant

Alexander Neil / 8 years ago

In the last 4 years since Siri made its debut, the assistant AI has helped and entertained many users of Apple’s iOS-based products around the world. Now, Siri’s creators Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer have revealed their latest AI project, Viv, that has been in stealth-development in the years after Siri’s release. The goal of this new assistant AI was to effectively create a better version of Siri that was capable of interacting with a number of different services instead of simply pushing a large volume of queries to a simple search engine. In a 20-minute on-stage demonstration at Disrupt NYC, Viv displayed the ability to handle a dozen complex requests, being able to flawlessly comprehend the request and connect to the relevant services in order to do tasks from online purchases to book reservations.

As a service, Viv has far more in common with newer AI assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa than its predecessor, Siri. While Siri is capable of performing a number of tasks within the iOS system itself, when confronted with more complex requests, the speech is simply interpreted to text and fed into a search engine. Instead, Viv incorporates a vast number of external services in order to provide more useful results to requests, allowing users to make requests with pure speech, instead of performing their intended action manually from a list of search results. This is all part of the idea that Viv should replace service-specific applications and allow countless actions that would previously require numerous apps to be done with just one AI.

“Viv is designed to be devices agnostic — think one platform, open to all services, for all devices, personalized for you. Viv’s goal is to be ubiquitous so it will understand your preferences and history as you engage with it on your mobile device, or in your car, or with your smart device at home,” said Adam Koopersmith, a partner with Pritzker Group Venture Capital, one of Viv’s investors. “Our sense is there will be a move away from having hundreds of different apps that act independently. These services will be integrated into everyday life. Viv will be the platform to enable it.”

How Viv will fare against the countless competitors that are springing up in the assistant AI market remains to be seen, but the feats that it has shown so far seem to put it head and shoulders above many others. Whether this means that companies such as Google and Facebook will seek to add the technology behind Viv to their own bots, just as Apple adopted Siri is currently unclear, but it may just be the case that Viv is available for all, regardless of platform.