A lot of people yet are unaware of the fact that Apple’s artificially intelligent voice assistant Siri was actually not developed by Apple themselves. Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer created the artificial intelligence in Siri, Apple’s digital voice assistant for natural language queries on a smartphone.
Today the duo came out with their newest creation and it’s called “Viv”, also an AI assistant that they have been developing incognito for the last four years. Their goal was to create a better version of Siri which served a varied range of services instead of just navigating it back to a basic web search. During the presentation at NYC the new voice assistant actually handled a lot of public requests quite flawlessly.
The major differences between Siri and Viv is that the fact that the latter is a far more open platform and isn’t restricted to only a single source. One of the biggest frustrations with Siri is that it has only a small number of tasks it can complete. Also, to add to it, Siri will default to a generic web search. Viv’s approach is more or less like that to Amazon’s Alexa or Facebook’s Messenger bots offering the ability to connect with third-party merchants and vendors to facilitate requests to purchase goods or book reservations. The company’s tagline is “intelligence becomes a utility” and it also aptly sums up its goal of powering the conversational AI inside digital services.
Viv is more like a broad horizontal AI and specialized vertical AI. As of now, Amazon and Facebook have been clear that their approach will aim to integrate with as many third-party services as possible. Siri and Google Now, on the other hand, have remained more closed off.
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