New Car Audio Interface Makes Siri Look Dumb

A new super intelligent assistant that could work with any device, including in-car devices, is being launched by Siri founders and a former Siri engineer.

Called Viv, it is so brainy it can answer very complex questions quickly, picking up where Siri and Google Now fall short.

Instead of asking Siri, as you drive, “What’s the weather today in Los Angeles?” you could ask “Was it raining in Seattle three Thursdays ago?”

Viv can execute commands like “Send Adam 20 bucks for the drinks last night.”  A friends list pops us, it knows which one is Adam and the money is sent.

Viv was shown at Tech Crunch Disrupt last week and is expected to appear in some devices by the end of the year, it hopes to be a ubiquitous as Bluetooth and WiFi in 5 years.

Where Siri and Google Now are programmed to perform about 25 tasks, Viv can do a hundred and will eventually do thousands because of its true artificial intelligence.  It can actually “self-write” code, so that it fills in the necessary gaps where programmers leave off.

At TechCrunch Disrupt, Viv co-founder Dag Kittlaus posed the question “Will it be warmer than 70 degrees near the Golden Gate Bridge after 5 pm tomorrow?”  Viv answered it quickly by breaking down the language and then self-generating code to call up the different services needed to answer the question, in this case, a weather forecast, calendar and maybe a time zone converter.   It did this in a 44-step process that took 10 milliseconds to execute, Kittlaus explained.

Viv enters the realm of true artificial intelligence, the kind of stuff that leading thinkers like Stephen Hawkins and Bill Gates are concerned about, least it’s used for the wrong purposes.

For now, it seems like we may get a user interface for the car and for any device, that’s “scary smart,” in the words of Fortune magazine.

“This will be the intelligent interface for everything,” said Kittlaus.

Source: Viv, TechCrunch,

Photo via TechCrunch