Siri’s long-lost fifth cousin is about to enter the fray, with Viv looking to overshadow its distant relative at the app dinner table.
It’s safe to say we all know what Siri is; it’s entertained, annoyed and been useful on the odd occasion, but it seems the original creators of the virtual assistant have spotted room for improvement.
And with that, Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer created Viv.
Speaking recently to the Washington Post, it was revealed that Kittlaus and Cheyer felt their vision of Siri didn’t “align” with Apple creator Steve Jobs – this unhappiness therefore resulted in their departure from the project.
But as with many tech entrepreneurs, they may have left the project, but their ideas and knowledge remain, they were always going to be back with something knew – that brings us to today.
Viv, “The Global Brain”, featuring an array of solid partnerships with well-known services looks to take virtual assistant to a new level, with a unique approach to understanding human queries. Gone were the days of asking your assistant the same question nine times before giving up and Googling it.
Unveiled recently in New York, Viv will start a “rolling launch” on the latter side of this year.
Viv has already made friends with Uber and she’s even flirted with payments app Venmo, Kittlaus actually sent $20 to his co-creator live on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt.
That’s not all, otherwise unfathomable questions the Apple cousin would struggle with, such as weather requests from a specific day three weeks ago, weren’t a struggle for Viv during the live demonstration.
Should Viv be capable of working out a Bristolian accent, I’ll be truly impressed. Siri falters, and hasn’t really improved enough, since it was first unveiled on the smartphone generation. I’m tired of asking my personal assistant for a ‘recipes using derby’ (cheese), only to be given the latest football results.
Simply put, Siri is outdated and needs a revamp, and it seems Viv won’t be joining the Apple army – in fact, it seems Kittlaus and Cheyer will be going it alone having already rejected offers from Google and Facebook.
As we discussed a few weeks ago, ‘bots’ are looking to be the next best thing, effectively becoming all-in-one apps.
This is what made Viv special, we may be looking at the first ‘real’ example of this kind of app that could change the entire app world as we know it – yes, really.
Existing virtual assistants run on ‘hard-coded’ actions, which basically means anything other than words and phrases programmers initially expected the assistants to be asks, will result in said assistants malfunctioning – anything more complex than the simple ‘How do’ and ‘Who is…’ etc is just a waste of time.
Viv will be different – Kittlaus showed how Viv generates its own programs almost instantly by assessing keywords and information points. This means Viv can ‘scale’ extremely quickly, adapting to what the users says, rather than the pre-programmed model we see in Siri.
Mr Kittlaus described Viv as “software that’s writing itself”.
So, this all sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well, it is, but Viv isn’t immune from a couple of a major flaws.
One of the main reasons we currently use existing personal assistants is for the ‘call <friend name>’ features they allow; the reason this is possible is because of the mass of data Apple, Google and Facebook to name a few have on the users. Viv won’t have this under its arsenal – while a far smarter intelligence, the existing counterparts may seem more useful to the typical user.
The only possible solution to this would be for the Viv team to collaborate with one of the big players, but as we’ve already mentioned, they don’t seem to want this. Clearly Viv will have a long battle ahead, but much like Leicester City winning the Premier League title, anything can happen.
For now though, it seems Viv is on her own.
