Kittlaus managed to use Viv to do other things such as ordering flowers, sent money (simulation) through Venmo, searched for free hotels for a vacation and also managed to order a 6 person Uber ride to Madison Square Garden with the new Viv technology.
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Earlier today, Kittlaus demoed Viv for the first time at Disrupt NY. Kittlaus called on Viv to pay a buddy $20 and all that followed was a tap of the pay button through a Venmo integration and, all of a sudden, his friend had been paid. Viv’s approach is much closer to Amazon’s Alexa or Facebook’s Messenger bots, offering the ability to connect with third-party merchants and vendors so that it can execute on requests to purchase goods or book reservations. In short: any service that wants to integrate with Viv should be able to. Viv is taught by the world, knows more than it is taught, and learns every day. It’s less about intuitively surfacing relevant search results or product suggestions, and more about actually having a conversation with an app or device where the device is essentially thinking for itself. If you throw the software a completely random, complex question, it will struggle to decode it in the same way a human assistant might.
The proof? Not just asking a voice assistant what the weather is, but asking whether it will be warmer than 70 degrees near the Golden Gate Bridge the day after tomorrow, or if it rained in Seattle three Thursdays ago.
While no release date has been set for Viv, the creators confirmed it would be available across multiple platforms and even devices and gadgets other than smartphones.
Kittlaus began with a broad and oft-uttered question regarding what the weather was like today, but then quickly evolved his demands of Viv into ludicrously complex pointed inquiries.
It may be that it doesn’t quite make out my accent – which is a mixture of Cambridgeshire and Londoner – while Google’s software manages just fine. Viv doesn’t yet have a virtual voice, which is one of Siri’s iconic features, but Kittlaus says they’re working on one right now.
Kittlaus believes there’s going to be a new icon on all devices that will be instantly recognizable as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and that’s Viv’s icon. You open the app and ask the assistant questions or issue commands.
‘If you look ahead, let’s say in the next five years or so, we think there’s going to be a new icon that’s recognizable, as recognizable as Bluetooth and Wifi, and that’s going to be this one, ‘ Kittlaus said in the demonstration, in regards to Viv. Kittlaus said Viv will see a “rolling launch” toward the end of this year, with developer partners announced around the same time.
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This is where Viv stands apart from other digital assistants, and even from other natural-language processing and machine-learning platforms like IBM Watson.
