Select a region
Watch out, Siri. There’s a new kick-ass virtual assistant on its way – and if the latest demo is anything to go by, it’s pretty smart.
Viv, the highly anticipated artificial intelligence assistant from the creators of Siri, made its formal public debut at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York.
Dag Kittlaus, chief executive of Viv, put the program through its paces in a live demo, showing how Viv converts sounds into words through Nuance speech recognition.
Here’s what we learned:
1. Viv can handle some pretty complex and specific questions.
Yes, Siri is good but Viv seems to be far better at answering complicated questions such as “Was it raining in Seattle three Thursdays ago?” and “Will it be warmer than 70 degrees near the Golden Gate Bridge after 5pm the day after tomorrow?”
Kittlaus says Viv is powered by a technology known as “dynamic program generation” – a software that can basically write itself in 10 milliseconds.
2. Viv connects to third-party services quite seamlessly.
Kittlaus demoed queries (using Uber and Hotels.com) with extremely specific voice commands.
“I need a ride for six people from my office to Madison Square Garden” allows Viv to connect to Uber and calculate what type of car is needed to accommodate the headcount, while “Give me a nice room in Palm Springs for Labour Day weekend” returns accurate results in a matter of seconds.
“Has anyone seen a hotel booking that simple before?” Kittlaus asked his audience.
This is also where Viv differs from Siri – Viv is far more open platform.
3. Viv can send money and items to friends with just one sentence.
To demonstrate this, Kittlaus asks Viv to “send Adam 20 bucks for the drinks last night”.
The virtual assistant is able to find the person in question and send money through payment app Venmo in just one command and even goes as far as to add the memo “for the drinks last night”.
Kittlaus also shows how Viv can send flowers to someone in four simple steps.
“The goal here is how easy can you make it to get things done by talking to things,” says Kittlaus.
However, Kittlaus didn’t elaborate on when Viv will be available to consumers and on what devices.
It’s also worth noting that while SoundHound’s virtual assistant Hound (and Viv’s potential competitor) has had good reviews, it hasn’t been a big hit with the public. So the question is, will Viv be able to entice the consumers as much as Siri when it is finally rolled out?
Watch Kittlaus’s full live demo.
