Virtual assistants have spent several years between us, but let’s face it, few people actively use, either because they do not provide what we need, or just do not understand what we say, so it is still easier to do it through a search engine or manually in our smartphone.
When Siri appeared in 2011 as part of the iPhone 4s, demonstrating their capabilities left everyone with their mouths open because first you were talking naturally to a machine, an expected evolution to voice commands present in several mobile for several years. But it seems that is about to change again because today we have the first live demonstration of Viv, the new personal assistant of the creators of Siri.
Viv, a global brain
Last week came up information pointing to that, co-founder of Siri, Dag Kittlaus would be presenting his new digital assistant, and that the first people who had had a chance to see it work were impressed because it was an important step in this industry that remains secondary and very unhelpful in most scenarios.
And so, today during the conference Disrupt organized by TechCrunch, Kittlaus showed the possibilities of Viv, a platform for artificial intelligence by the same Kittlaus “is better than Siri is an intelligent interface for all”, this thanks to its great capacity interaction and compression tasks and complex sentences.
Viv does not already own voice as if Siri or other assistant, but are already working on it, meanwhile have simply present of which is capable with amazing results because it can string together phrases and interact with third party applications to request services or additional information, which is one of the main problems of Siri.
Viv is able to answer perfectly to elaborate phrases as will there be more than 30 degrees near the Golden Gate Bridge after 5 in the afternoon after tomorrow? To which the assistant answers “no, it is not so hot” but the whole context of research that had to make connecting to the Weather Underground app. If we ask the same sentence to other attendees, first, we were lucky that we understand, and second, at least we will open the weather forecast for the next few days.
Like Siri, Viv system is based speech recognition as created by Nuance, but also incorporates a platform with natural language technology, this makes Viv can also determine the intent of the question, besides causing a dynamic question-answer creates context, this will because Viv follow the conversation without changing the subject.
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Another example of its capabilities is within transactions and purchase products, as such you may be asked “send $ 20 to Adam for drinks last night” and Viv opens the corresponding app with the indicated amount and a message recipient, we only need to confirm. Another example was buying flowers, using Uber and even booking a hotel, is that Viv is offered not only as an assistant, but also as an open platform where developers can enable APIs for the wizard to interact with these apps and expand its capabilities.
Viv has been in development discreetly in recent years, with private investors who’s identity is unknown, there is only a rumor that Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter and LinkedIn executives are behind this important project. So far there is no date of when we can know a test version of Viv, but is expected to end of the year us hear. Meanwhile here is the first public demonstration of Viv.