Dear Microsoft - Please buy VIV and integrate Cortana into that platform

[Great deal]

I read about VIV a few years ago, was super impressive then and better now. It is sooo much better than anything Apple, Microsoft or Google have and one of will buy it. They created Siri and sold it to Apple, if Apple get VIV then its slam dunk, good night sweet Cortana. Please throw money at this.

 

[Jazmac]

Interesting. I love the technology but this is going to end up putting a boat load of people out of work... starting with Amazon.com. I could see online stores trying to buy this outright or incorporating this in their business model and ultimately send mass amounts of families to the unemployment line.

 

[astondg]

I know this is going to sound like an absurd claim but anyway: I started building something very similar to this in .NET in about 2009. I used .NET's Expression Trees built from a user's query and then executed the query by resolving appropriate services dynamically at run time based on the NLP tags, context (everything from time, date & location to previous queries to info about the user) and transforming the inputs/outputs dynamically as necessary to pass from service to service.

I had a basic Proof of Concept but it was just an enormous task for single developer. Even just the NLP portion would have kept me busy for years at that time. I tried to get some friends on board and pitched it to a university as a research project but I couldn't get any interest.

Anyway, now I'm seeing things like Google Now, Cortana and Viv I'm sad I couldn't get mine off the ground BUT I'm also excited that this is finally starting to be realised. It would be awesome if Cortana could pick up some of these tricks.