The creators of Siri, Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, have rolled out Viv, a next generation AI assistant. They worked in stealth mode for four years before launching it to a dazzled audience at Disrupt New York. We are talking a different kind of IQ here. For twenty minutes onstage, Viv handled complex questions, connecting to an array of goods and services providers, instead of shuffling off to a basic web search, as Siri does. To put it in layman’s terms, Viv will be able to act on complex queries such as “On the way to my brother’s house, I need to pick up some cheap wine that goes well with lasagna,” in the felicitous example given by The Verge’s Ben Popper. That you should trust Viv’s choice of wine rather than yours is an infinitely more complex issue, beyond the scope of this writing.
