Siri creators launch Viv, a voice assistant that hopes to run people’s entire lives

Siri’s creators have given the first demonstration of their new technology, which they hope will be able to run people’s entire lives.

The new voice assistant, named Viv, has the power to talk to people, find out what they want and bring it to them. The creators – which include Dag Kittlaus, the man behind Siri – claim that users will be able to talk to Viv like a normal person and have it do everything for them.

The creators claim that the assistant, which might in the future be included in everything from cars to fridges, could be as important as Wi-Fi and BlueTooth have been.

The presentation in New York included a demonstration where Mr Kittlaus said that he wanted to order flowers for mothers’ day. It did so, finding out the address to send them to and placing an order with the shop, before showing a confirmation receipt on the screen.

Because the software is built to write its own code, which means that it can work out the answer to highly complex and specific questions, Viv’s creators claim it can be more clever than competitors like Siri.

Since Siri was brought to the iPhone, a whole host of robotic voices have sprung up hoping to help people out. Siri competes with Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google’s voice assistant, which doesn’t have a name.

The creators of Siri and now Viv said in a Washington Post article last week that they had become close with Steve Jobs, but ultimately his vision of what would happen to Siri “wasn’t necessarily aligned with all the things that we were doing”. Mr Kittlaus left Apple a year later and then many of the original Siri engineers later followed.

Though the pair didn’t discuss the nature of those disagreements, they could revolve around the differing approaches to openness that Siri and now Viv display. Siri has little power to do anything outside of Apple’s own ecosystem – it can open other apps but not actually do anything with them – but Viv is being sold as an entirely open system.

That means that Viv is integrated with a huge range of partners. It can order cars from Uber, for instance, or takeaway pizza through other online services.

That could mean that it eventually gets around the tradition routes to getting apps, which are currently mediated by Google and Apple. If the apps are built into the Viv platform, then people won’t need to download them but instead just start chatting – with their cars, TVs or smart appliances.

Because Viv is not tied to any particular device, unlike almost every rival voice assistant, it could eventually be integrated into all of those devices without having to send people back to ones made by the company, its creators hope.

Viv hasn’t said when its voice assistant will be announced. Though it can understand voice commands made by other people, doesn’t yet have its own way of speaking.