Viv, an AI voice assistant crafted by former Siri developers, will publicly showcase its potential at an industry conference on May 9.
The team behind Viv aims to show what Siri could have been. The new AI assistant can respond to complicated spoken requests, something that Siri lacks the ability to do. As experts from the AI industry point out, the initial Siri concept was far from the clever AI chatbot that we came to use and appreciate.
The coders behind Viv did an experiment where pizza was ordered only by talking to the voice assistant, and according to a Washington Post report, it was a success.
According to Oren Etzioni, chief executive of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, Viv is designed to mimic the spontaneity and knowledge base of a human assistant.
For example, Viv should be able to book reservations for dinner and a movie in a conversational manner. On the other hand, using Siri involves a long series of questions and accessing apps such as OpenTable to manually pay for reservations.
Viv Labs acknowledges that third-party cooperation is necessary in order to calibrate the AI with external services. That is why Viv signed Uber, GrubHub, SeatGuru and Zocdoc to be in the lineup of Viv's launch partners.
Users will be able to hail cabs or order food from the famous services simply by telling Viv what they desire.
There is a strong resemblance between what Viv promises to deliver and the original intent of Amazon's Alexa. It even reminds us of the chatbot feature that Facebook touted about Messenger in April.
The Washington Post says that both Facebook and Google offered to purchase Viv, but the developers are still weighing in the offers. Viv Labs wants the new AI assistant to be part of every smart object, regardless if we refer to a phone, car or connected household devices.
The Siri lesson is well remembered. When it rolled out as an independent app, Siri could buy tickets, hail cabs and reserve tables, all without using additional apps or search engines. The features were discontinued after Apple purchased it in 2010.
The race between major tech players to bring a "functional Siri" to the table has been on for years, and it remains to be seen whether Viv will be the winner.
