The team behind Apple’s voice assistant Siri have revealed their latest independent project “Viv”, an AI bot that lives on your phone and aims to be “the intelligent interface for everything.”
Viv was unveiled at Techcruch’s Disrupt conference, where a 20-minute demo wowed the audience with a real-time demonstration of its capabilities.
The company behind Viv has dubbed it “The Global Brain”, and its strength lies in tight partnerships with popular services, and a unique way of understanding human queries.
Unlike Siri, 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.
“Will it be warmer than 70-degrees near the Golden Gate Bridge after 5pm the day after tomorrow?”
Viv delivered the answer in a matter of seconds, and correctly handled numerous oddly specific questions that followed.
On stage Kittlaus showed how he could say “send Adam 20 bucks for the drinks last night”, and Viv would integrate with payments app Venmo to send the money quickly.
He also showed off complex sentences, such as asking if it was raining in Seattle three weeks ago on Thursday.
There were integrations with flower sellers, and Uber, and various other services we’ve seen linked up before through apps, most recently Facebook’s Messenger.
Viv was created by Siri’s creators Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, whi have now left Apple. In a revealing Washington Post piece last week, they said their vision didn’t “align” with that of Steve Jobs – and there was only ever going to be one winner in that situation.
So they left, leaving behind Siri, but taking with them a hope to build on what they knew and create something new.
The app will start a “rolling launch” towards the end of this year.