Viv demonstrates her new virtual assistant

Viv, which includes in its staff a large part of the team that worked on Siri now about five years ago, presented its new virtual assistant yesterday. There was a lot of expectation, for who they are and what they promised, that it was a much more capable virtual assistant than Siri, which was the idea they had in the beginning but that they had to put aside when Apple bought the technology.

In the following video, of just over 11 minutes, we can see a demonstration of the new Artificial Intelligence assistant. Admittedly, your recognition and understanding of the orders is one step ahead of Siri, something that is demonstrated when you ask "Will it be hotter than 21 degrees on the Golden Gate Bridge after 5 PM the day after tomorrow?»And he answers him correctly, although, logically, the answer would be the same if he had asked him the same thing but about California.

Viv's Virtual Assistant Demo

Viv focuses on integration with applications and third-party developers. This is precisely Siri's Achilles heel, since Apple wants to have full control over its technology and, although I am sure it will be able to do so in the future, at the moment it is not capable of, for example, sending a WhatsApp. But Viv also has her weak point: Siri, Cortana or Google Now are integrated into the system. What does this mean? Well, we can invoke them with our voice and they can make changes of all kinds at any time because they are always running in the background. As good as Viv is, it will only be an application that we will have to pay attention to in order for it to work.

What I do think that needs to be done is to acknowledge the work that the team that also helped create Siri has done, but I am left with the feeling that their intention was not to create a virtual assistant (which, by the way, not has a voice), if not demonstrate what could be done if developers and companies agreed or that another company more permissive than Apple arrives and takes over its services. It will be interesting to see the future of Viv's project.