The report announcing virtual assistant said that Viv has been under development for past many years. Viv is able to do a wide variety of things that Siri can not.
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Viv reportedly can order a pizza with your favorite toppings, hail a taxi ride to the dentist, or order flowers for your mom by drawing on data from other web services, such as FTD, Uber, and GrubHub, with little typing, clicking, or further input from you. Thus, Siri, Inc. was born.
Viv in many ways is what Kittlaus and Cheyer originally wanted Siri to be.
We love iPhone’s Siri, but sometimes our requests to her get lost in translation. What’s not clear is how they plan to distribute Viv.
The problem with present-day Siri is that it can’t act independently. Siri is more limited than Kittlaus and Cheyer intended. If you ask Siri to buy you tickets to a Kanye West concert, the assistant will likely pull up a Ticketmaster’s site where you will then have to manually buy the tickets. The virtual assistant will provide you with a huge variety of services, all very easily accessible from the same page. All of those are created to work specifically for the companies that designed them and the apps they partner with. Google delivered the first major competition with Google Now, and efforts from Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon have led to a healthy pool of competition to drive the scene even further. That’s the problem with current systems. Instead, people are looking for a smart machine that can chat with us and make restaurant reservations without burdening us with the need to touch a screen or dial a phone. They want you to hail an uber by saying “I need a ride”.
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“It’s about taking the way that humans have naturally interacted with each other for thousands of years and applying that to the way they interact with services”. Viv was created to be an all-encompassing hub which allows you access to pretty much anything you could want to do on the internet. While Google Now does a lot of what Siri and Cortana offer, it is not as interactive and therefore Viv would seem like a good fit. We’ll find out this coming Monday if Viv – already attracting the interest of Facebook and Google – really is the future of AI at TechCrunch Disrupt.
