The creators of Apple’s artificial intelligence assistant, Siri, have come out with a new product, Viv, which can handle more complicated tasks and partner with third party sites. Ordering things online is definitely going to become a helluva lot easier.
Long Story
Siri is great and all, but she’s got some flaws (sorry baby). Most of what she can do is Google search things for you, which is helpful, but also not spectacular with a boat load of other requests. For instance, what if you wanted to order some flowers for your mom on Mother’s Day? Siri wouldn’t be able to do that since it doesn’t play well with external sites. It’d probably just take you to the site that you can order from or tell you how to get to the store. That’s where Siri’s younger sis, Viv, comes in.
The AI assistant Viv was created by Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, the same guys who invented Siri and sold it to Apple. What makes Viv special is its ability to handle more complicated tasks and work with other apps or websites. For instance, it can answer things too complicated for Siri, such as queries like: “On the way to my brother’s house, I need to pick up some cheap wine that goes well with lasagna,” according to The Verge.
Want to order a pizza to the office? No matter how complicated the order is — half-and-half, side of caesar salad, etc. — Viv can handle it.
“Our sense is there will be a move away from having hundreds of different apps that act independently,” said Adam Koopersmith, one of Viv’s investors, as quoted by The Verge. “These services will be integrated into everyday life. Viv will be the platform to enable it.”
Viv works a lot like Facebook’s new Messenger bots and Amazon’s Alexa in this way by working with other apps and sites, but it alsoftf talks like those services, which enables us to speak in the conversational way humans really communicate. And also like those services, Viv will only get better the more it talks with and learns from humans — just so long as nobody corrupts it like Tay, Microsoft’s teenage chatbot.
Viv isn’t currently owned by anyone in particular, Facebook and Google are very interested. Will be exciting to see who wins the sweepstakes.
Own The Conversation
Ask The Big Question
Will we all be asking bots to do everything for us instead of actually using our fingers?
Disrupt Your Feed
Thought people chatting to their headphones as they walk was annoying? Just wait till it’s more socially acceptable to chat with your AI assistant in the middle of a crowd.
Drop This Fact
Siri was originally intended to be open to other apps, before Steve Jobs turned it into something that didn’t work with other services, as he famously did with all of Apple’s products, according to a report on Viv by
