Viv is a new digital AI assistance created by makers of Siri. Since co-founder of the artificial intelligent software Dag Kittlaus announced the news, a lot of people are asking what Viv can do and how is it better than Siri.
During a conference at TechCrunch, Kittlaus showed the basic voice commands that drive Viv. However, the digital assistance software is currently in development and does not have the voice capability.
Viv responded to some complex questions that demonstrated by Kittlause and it is, in fact, better than Siri at understanding difficult sentence structures. When asked, "was it raining in Seattle three Thursdays ago?" Viv responded with the text "Yes, it rained on Thursday, April 21st" after performing few seconds of weather check.
Most of the enhanced capabilities of Viv's intelligent programming lies in the background processing. It cannot only find the required information but write a program in real time that helps it understand the question and find the right information.
This is a new technology is "computer science breakthrough" that Viv-maker likes to call "Dynamic Program generation." So the digital AI assistance has just been taken to the next level where programs can create programs, a notion which was idealized in the 1999 blockbuster hit movie "The Matrix."
During the public address, Kittlaus pointed out that the digital assistants of various tech companies work differently. Users have to memorize and ask only the specific question that these AI programs can understand, which becomes annoying as you switch devices.
A question can be asked in many different ways, but Siri, Ok, Google, Amazon Echo's Alexa, and Microsoft's Coratana only respond to limited types. This also applies to the chatbot recently integrated into the Facebook Messenger. Kittlaus stressed that Viv is different because it can scale up.
He says that Viv can handle multiple ways of handling questions, furthermore, it learns from the users and his personal preference along the time. And while Siri is limited to iOS, Alexa works only with Echo, and Cortana is only available on Windows 10; Viv's availability across all the devices and platforms gives it higher usability.
Viv can also be connected to services and is more developer-friendly for third-party programmers to integrate it into their services. It is already integrated into Uber and couple of other services including GrubHub and SeatGuru, Telegraph reported.
As demonstrated by Kittlaus, Viv can send people money or gifts through with something called "Conversation Commerce" with just voice command. Additionally, people will be able to order Uber or other transport services as well.
The fact that Viv has deep learning capability, has a more personalized experience and is available on all the device makes it better than Siri, Cortana, Amazon's Alexa etc. The fully functional Viv is expected hit all types of devices and services next year. The following video provides more highlights about the new digital AI assistant.