Siri-maker's Viv is the next advancement in digital assistant evolution

Siri creator Dag Kittlaus’ new intelligent voice controlled digital assistant was demonstrated at a TechCrunch event, Disrupt NY. “OK Google” is a fast voice search interface which uses machine learning to get better at delivering results. Siri and Cortana are digital assistants with a hard coded personality. Meet Viv, a digital assistant that generates and executes code on the fly. Viv writes its own program in real time to provide a more natural voice interface. Viv can write a program within 10 milliseconds by a process known as dynamic program generation, which is a computer science breakthrough. This approach allows Viv to answer questions of far more complexity than the current generation of voice interfaces. You can ask long questions, with specifics, and Viv also tracks your previous questions for context. On the demo was the question “Was it raining in Seattle three Thursdays ago”.  Dynamic program generation allows Viv to scale, when new features or apps are added, which is different from feeding in more and more hard coded responses into the backend of an intelligent digital assistant. Viv’s brain is a cloud of capabilities, that tie into different apps, and can perform actions directly in those apps. For example, Kittlaus asked Viv to book a taxi for six people, and Viv knew what kind of vehicle to call for from Uber. Viv can do this because of a brain, with associated areas and capabilities visually mapped. This is very basic as of now, but is expected to get better and better as more and more developers add their utilities to Viv. Kittlaus visualised Viv as the next store, the marketplace where you can buy everything using only voice commands. Kittlaus called this “conversational commerce.” Viv keeps in mind the conversation history, the AI recognizes and responds to follow up questions. In the demo, Kittlaus ordered flowers, booked a hotel room, paid back a loan to a friend and booked a cab in rapid succession.