Siri co-creators and former Apple employees, Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, are working on a more sophisticated voice assistant called Viv, which will be able to handle more tasks than any of today’s options. Viv is expected to be a tough competitor for Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana Amazon’s Alexa and Google Now.
As a virtual assistant intended to reinvent the way consumers interact with their devices, Viv represents the next step in voice assistants, Washington Post reported Wednesday. And after years of development, the team that created Siri and then sold it to Apple is now ready for a public demonstration at a tech conference on Monday.
Voice assistants’ role has consisted in offering a hands-free and more natural way to ask questions, find information, and manage busy lives. But Viv’s creators said they took the concept further by understanding your requests and engaging in conversation with you to fulfill them.
Viv wants to help you with task of daily life
With key partnerships and a vast database from which to draw, Viv’s ambition is to become the portal through which users connect with businesses and service providers. Viv takes a page from Amazon’s Echo –a wireless speaker that responds to your questions and requests –and can directly integrate with third-party services, so users tell Viv to hail an Uber car, order flowers from FTD, snag their next meal from Grubhub and order pizza.
According to the Washington Post, Dag Kittlaus ,Viv co-creator, said he was chatting with car makers, TV companies, and other media firms about integrating their products with Viv.
Viv isn’t available (yet) to buy or use, but there are interested parties. For example, both Google and Facebook have made offers to buy Viv, said the reports. Kittlaus and Cheyer want to distribute the technology across multiple platforms, with integration from as many vendors as possible. The team affirmed not to be averse to selling Viv, just as it did with Siri, but they are still unclear whether to run with it themselves or sell it to another company.
“There’s no way to predict where that goes except to say we’ll pick the path that gets us there. Either way, we will finish the job,” Kittlaus told the Post.
Team’s envision Viv as something that can be a part of our daily lives.
Source: CNET