Siri creators show voice-activated search assistant Viv in New York

The developers of Apple’s virtual assistant Siri have unveiled a new voice-activated assistant called Viv. Viv should be a better version of Siri that can link different services instead of forwarding “difficult” questions to an internet search.

Viv managed a dozen complex questions during a twenty-minute demonstration at the Techcrunch Disrupt NYC event. In most cases, it was not so much a question of how complicated a question was, but also that Viv could connect the questions with other providers of services and goods instead of resorting to a ‘normal’ search on a search engine.

Also, Viv is designed not to be dependent on any particular kind of device. It should become more or less an open platform, open to all services and accessible via all devices. That should make Viv “ubiquitous,” Adam Koopersmith, one of Viv’s investors, told The Verge. Viv needs to remember ‘user preferences and history’, across all devices. The goal is to make Viv a platform that integrates all independently operating apps.

Viv’s ‘secret sauce’ is what Viv CEO Dag Kittlaus calls ‘dynamic program generation’ during his presentation at Disrupt. The assistant supported by artificial intelligence understands intent and can generate a program from it to give the best answer to the question.

“The idea of ​​Viv is that developers can get on with it and build anything they want,” Kittlaus says. Developers don’t have to write all the code, but describe what they want Viv to do.

Viv has been in the works for about four years now. The company secured $12.5 million in investments from Iconiq Capital. Rumors appearing in The Washington Post that Google and Facebook were already trying to acquire the company, Kittlaus dismissed questions from the public like, “You’ve heard of it, you can probably read about it,” without delving further into it. to go.