
Creators of Siri just showed off their next AI assistant, Viv, and it's incredible - rfjedwards
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/9/11639992/viv-digital-assistant-ai-artificial-intelligence-siri
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FreedomToCreate
My biggest issue with this is that most people shop around and compare prices,
especially when shopping for hotels or gifts. A lot of there demos may apply
in last minute buying situations, but I don't see people using it when they
want to find the best price on something. Especially since only select service
providers are available. It is extremely impressive though.

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tedmiston
Exactly. Also, I might search on multiple services to seek out a better deal
vs. what is the quickest and easiest to purchase. I think Viv needs to have a
good understanding of your preferences [across requests] to do that well.

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FreedomToCreate
They are looking at it from the point of view of giving the normal man a
personal assistant like the millionaires. But a normal person has to optimize
how they use their money. They can't abstract away purchase decisions because
they are a combination of financial and personal. I may need a hotel but I
don't necessarily want the best one (ex. the most expensive) or the cheapest
(ex. the grungy one). I usually research where in the city I want to spend
time and find a hotel within my budget.

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vr3690
That demo was very cool. But:

1\. do we really want a centralised service for everything that has access to
a lot of data within a walled garden?

2\. Siri only works well with North American accents afaik (maybe all western
accents?). Alexa's voice recognition is the best and I hope Viv does a similar
job.

3\. This is mostly a personal preference, but for online shopping I prefer
using a lot of filters. This UI doesn't really help with that.

Also, HN probably knows better but is the "computed plan" shown in the demo,
different from an execution plan created by an RDBMS?

