Next-gen PDA Viv: Siri Developers' Advanced AI System Will Understand Complex Voice Commands

The creators of Apple's hugely popular personal digital assistant (PDA) Siri are working on developing an artificial intelligence (AI) system that will be more advanced than Apple's PDA.

According to a Wired report, Siri's engineers Dag Kittlaus, Chris Brigham and Adam Cheyer are developing a next-generation AI system termed Viv, the same name as the engineers' startup Viv labs.

"Siri is chapter one of a much longer, bigger story," Dag Kittlaus told Wired.

According to the engineers, Viv has been designed to fulfil 'beyond-the simple' requirements that smartphone users have and "will be able to learn, giving it almost limitless capabilities".

The biggest advantage that Viv will have over PDAs such as Apple Siri and Google Now, is its ability to put together seemingly 'complex' information that users request.

An illustration that Dag Kittlaus provides to prove his point is the fact that users should be able to ask Viv questions such as: "What is the population of the city where Abraham Lincoln was born?". According to Kittlaus, other PDAs fail to put together a response for a question like the above, even though they have the answer within their inbuilt system.

Viv's engineers state that the next-gen PDA will parse the command, automatically integrate third-party information sources and display these as a collection to users in a comparatively shorter time.

Thanks to this ability to 'link' together data for multiple components in a request, generating its own code, the device will be able to perform functions such as finding tickets in the cheapest/next available flight between two points/destinations.

Apart from complex commands, Viv would also assist users in day-to-day activities such as booking cabs and searching for requested information, by accessing other applications within the user device.

Another important aspect of Viv is what its creators deem a 'global brain'. With sophisticated algorithms being used in its coding, the PDA is expected to interpret the way in which people (its users) behave, in addition to grasping their language.

"By knowing who its users are and which services they interact with, Viv can sift through that vast trove of data and find new ways to connect and manipulate the information", according to the PDA's creators.

For example, the PDA will know to call a cab when users tell it: "I'm Drunk".

Finally, Viv's creators state that the PDA would be capable of knowing what users want even before they explicitly ask the assistant for something.

However, with Siri having been branded by iPhone users throughout the world as a 'fairly intelligent' PDA, and with Microsoft Cortana also being claimed to be better than Siri in terms of grasping user input language, Viv may have some difficult barriers to break through once official.