The inventors of Apple’s virtual assistant software, Siri, have just demonstrated their secret, next-generation, artificial intelligence assistant. Created by Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, Viv is four years in the making. She offers an open platform through which queries can connect with third-party merchants. And yesterday, during Kittlaus’s demo at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Viv performed flawlessly as her creator gave her tasks that would likely see Siri fumbling for answers.
Viv’s talent is in analyzing natural language queries, breaking them down to their components to determine intent, and feeding these requests off to bots that can easily process them. In this sense, Viv is a flexible “top bot” that commands a number of very inflexible specialized bots. This enables Viv to satisfy many unique requests by delegating tasks vertically. Whereas the highly specialized, personal assistant X.ai is capable of competently managing a calendar, Viv – like Siri – is designed to handle multiple tasks at various times. However, where Siri often falls back on a search engine to answer complicated questions, Viv seems to capably find an answer by relying on the support of the company’s partners. See Kittlaus's demonstration and interview at Disrupt NY below.