Siri's maker finally unveils dev-tastic universal AI interface Viv

Not just the Young Ones

All the Vivian's (Viv Richards) and Viviennes (Vivienne Leigh) are not going to be too happy about being reduced to a bot.

"an intelligent, conversational interface" to "distribute products"

That sounds like taking away the salesperson who cold-calls you right before dinner and replacing him with a salesperson that hounds you all day long from your pocket.

I'm sure it'll be a great product, after all, it's on Apple - but I am much too wary of the marketing possibilities to buy into that.

Ah, I love the smell of patents in the morning!

Colour me cynical (it's my favourite colour, after British summertime pink and grumpy bastard grey), but haven't we had software that converts a general query into an series of execution steps for a while now? Only this morning I ran a Hive query on a Hadoop cluster that took a general query and a set of metadata describing the domain and deployed and ran a long (oh Lord, it was long) series of software components across a cluster in order to give an answer back.

On the plus side, a developer who does a live speech recognition demo asking for tulips for his mother deserves either kudos or a wide berth.

Interesting

Cloudy availability of services like this and IBM's Watson should lead to some very rapid and far reaching innovation

That's all very well . ..

but will it be able to, "wecommend a westaurant"?

What's the point?

Does anyone bother with these assistants. Every time I've ever tried it's so much more of a PITA than just typing stuff in.