Although Siri is most often associated with Apple, it was once just a creation of three men, Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyner and Chris Brigham. Now the team has formed their own company, Viv Labs, and claims that they're making the next generation of voice assistants that will be smarter and more human than anything we've seen yet.
"Siri is chapter one of a much longer, bigger story," says Kittlaus.
Now working independently from Apple, the team at Viv Labs are creating Viv, a digital assistant that will be able to do everything that Siri can't, from booking flights to hailing cabs to looking up seemingly unrelated information. Based on machine-learning, Viv will learn how to tackle a variety of subjects, as well as make associations based on what its users tell it to do. Need a cheap flight out of Newark airport to Los Angeles? Ask Viv to find it and book it, and it will.
Viv will also be able to use third-party apps and their information to make requests. Perhaps you want to book that L.A. flight using flight rewards through a specific airline. Viv will access that airline's app, spend the appropriate amount of reward points on that flight, and book it for you without needing any other prompts.
What separates Viv apart from other digital assistants, such as Siri and Google Now, is that it can handle more complex requests, as well as learn with each user request. It will tap into a huge database of user information in the cloud and be able to spit out a correct answer or result in seconds.
Perhaps most surprisingly is that unlike Siri, Viv won't be a service exclusive to Apple. The team hopes that the service will be almost like a public utility, something everyone has access to on their phones, TVs and other internet-connected devices.
"I'm extremely proud of Siri and the impact it's had on the world, but in many ways it could have been more," says Cheyer. "Now I want to do something bigger than mobile, bigger than consumer, bigger than desktop or enterprise. I want to do something that could fundamentally change the way software is built."
Viv Labs isn't the only team looking to make digital assistants smarter. Microsoft is already taking shots at Siri in ads for its upcoming smarter assistant, Cortana. And both Facebook and Google are also investing a large amount of time and money in artificial intelligence.
