Siri Creator Unveils ‘Siri-Killer’

One of the men who created Siri says he’s created a voice controlled artificial intelligence tool that’s smarter and more adaptive than the likes of Siri, Google Now and Amazon Alexa.

According to Dag Kittlaus, the new virtual assistant system named Viv has several key advantages:

• It’s better able to parse complex natural language requests. (A demo showed Viv able to answer questions such as “Will it be warmer than 70-degrees near the Golden gate bridge after 5pm the day after tomorrow?”)
• It’s much better at integrating with online services, rather than relying on a web search to deal with many requests. Kittlaus went as far as to say that the integration could make using dedicated apps for individual tasks unnecessary.
• It’s designed to work with a wider range of mobile systems and with devices other than the usual phones, computers and tablets.

One of the main keys to the way Viv works is what the makers call “dynamic program generation.” That means that it continues to learn more efficient and flexible ways of parsing a request and finding a solution. It’s also possible — in the demo version at least — to peek beneath the bonnet and see the specific code that Viv generates for each step of this process, something that could make it easier for developers to build tools that harness the technology.