Viv.ai has been one of the Silicon Valley’s best kept open secrets since August 2014, when Wired magazine published an article by Steven Levy with a headline that called it a “radical AI that does anything you ask.” In that respect, we have have been aware of Viv’s intent and aspirations for nearly two years.

Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, Dag Kittlaus, company co-founder and CEO will, with hope, provide more details about the progress it has made in its efforts to fulfill on the promises that Siri had prior to its acquisition by Apple. At that time they called their service an “action engine” that could understand the words people spoke to their smartphones and rapidly move them from intent to completed transaction.

While we have no prior copy of Kittlaus’s talk, we know that the company has spent the last two years refining an app that is able to understand spoken (or keyed in) instructions from a broad variety of individuals with great accuracy. In doing so, it is building upon its principals prior efforts, over more than a decade, at SRI and pre-acqusition Siri to create a service that moved people rapidly from their spoken instructions to task completion. We wrote about Siri first here (in February 2010), with an update in in April 2010, when I wrote that Apple’s acquisition of Siri marked the beginning of the age of “Intelligent Assistance.”

What Apple initiated,  Amazon Alexa and Google Now are amplifying. Viv aims to take things a step further by creating a universal AI-driven user interface that fulfills on Siri’s initial intent. Today’s list of launch partners reportedly include Uber, GrubHub, SeatGuru and Zocdoc. At the time of acquisition by Apple, Siri had negotiated revenue-splits with the likes of Fandango for movies and OpenTable for restaurant reservations to support a revenue model that took a percentage of the sales in return for providing live customers to businesses. Because it regarded Siri as a feature that would help sell smartphones, Apple had no economic incentive to pursue a transaction-driven model.

With over six years of development under their belts and tremendous advancements in both market conditioning (thanks to Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Now and Apple’s Siri) and in core technology like speech recognition and transcription approaching 90%, Viv’s timing is impeccable. It comes in the wake of Facebook’s F8, which turned Conversational Commerce and messaging based Chatbots into a given. If Apple’s acquisition of Siri in 2010 heralded the Age of Intelligent Assistance, Viv’s advent accelerates its maturity and creates a framework for all companies with digital assets and aspirations to let their customers stay in touch by using their own words and the devices that are most convenient.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants

Tags: Artificial Intelligence, conversational commerce, Intelligent Assistance, Viv.ai