Siri creators showcase next AI assistant Viv

Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer who developed the artificial intelligence behind Siri, have unveiled their newest creation Viv, a next generation AI assistant that they had been quietly developing for the last four years.

They intended to create a better version of Siri, one that connected to a multitude of services, instead of routinely shuffling queries off to a basic web search. Viv did a great job of handling several complex requests during a 20-minute demonstration at Disrupt NYC.

The AI assistant flawlessly handled several complex requests, not just in terms of comprehension, but by connecting with third-party merchants to purchase goods and book reservations.

Viv's approach is much closer to Amazon's Alexa or Facebook's Messenger bots, thanks to its ability to connect with third-party merchants and vendors to allow users to purchase goods or book reservations.

According to commentators, the company's tagline - intelligence becomes sums up the goal of powering the conversational AI inside a multitude of gadgets and digital services, quite elegantly.

Kittlaus is CEO of San Jose, California-based Viv Labs and if he could pull off its bold vision, Viv would be a personalised assistant that would be available to users on any device and powered by every service. The idea was that one would be able to talk to Viv as naturally as if one were speaking to another person, and one would use one's voice to order flowers or summon an Uber, which Kittlaus showed off during his demonstration.

The goal is to ''open up the ecosystem where this world of assistants that we're used to today that have several dozen capabilities now has an opportunity to explode to hundreds of thousands and tens of thousands of times the number of capabilities that some of today's assistants have,'' he said in an interview after leaving the Disrupt stage.

''We think the key to that is having a third party platform where anyone can add to the experience.''