In seeing the Siri team's new voice-guided personal assistant program, Viv, I am now even more confident in saying that the next 'platform war' will be in personal assistants and 'AIs'. Now rest assured (kind of), much of the Siri team left to create Viv Labs and Viv is an independent initiative. You can read about it on Wired (Siri’s Inventors Are Building a Radical New AI That Does Anything You Ask | Enterprise | WIRED).
Viv is basically a platform for app developers, vendors, services, etc, to tap into in order to (1) offer their goods to the end user and (2) to allow the end user to tap into their resources in order to do stuff. Imagine you're a restaurant, you can link up with Viv and allow prospective customers to book reservations, order food, find you, etc through Viv.
Looking at Viv Lab's intentions thus far, we can safely assume that a Viv app will make its way to iOS, Android and potentially even Windows Phone. At the end of the day you're basically talking about an app that links up to the back-end services.
Once Viv materializes, the new platform war will be on in earnest. It'll be Google Now vs. Cortana vs. Viv vs. Siri vs. anyone else looking to join in on the fight. The key ingredient to success, I think, will be pervasiveness in terms of users and supporting developers, vendors, services. In this regard it seems Google Now and Viv are best positioned to succeed by virtue of pervasiveness and openness, respectively.
But Microsoft does have a chance at pre-empting, but it'll require it to think of Cortana not as a feature, but as a platform. And on that note, it may be imperative to push Cortana the service on iOS and Android.
Cue pain and anguish.
Okay, let's think about this logically. If much of Cortana is online and web based, would going cross-platform really hurt? At the end of the day, its functions using Windows Phone's native capabilities are finite, at some point they will be complete.
Secondly, if Cortana was viewed as a pervasive entity, the incentive for developers, vendors and services to link up to it will be stronger. If the core standards(for doing reservations, payment, etc) for Cortana were kept common across platforms, then theoretically Windows, WP and Xbox could benefit from a halo effect.
Just to be fair, Cortana should go beyond just operating systems, I am thinking internet-of-things as well. Cortana should be available for use by wearables, appliances, cars, etc.
Viv is basically a platform for app developers, vendors, services, etc, to tap into in order to (1) offer their goods to the end user and (2) to allow the end user to tap into their resources in order to do stuff. Imagine you're a restaurant, you can link up with Viv and allow prospective customers to book reservations, order food, find you, etc through Viv.
Looking at Viv Lab's intentions thus far, we can safely assume that a Viv app will make its way to iOS, Android and potentially even Windows Phone. At the end of the day you're basically talking about an app that links up to the back-end services.
Once Viv materializes, the new platform war will be on in earnest. It'll be Google Now vs. Cortana vs. Viv vs. Siri vs. anyone else looking to join in on the fight. The key ingredient to success, I think, will be pervasiveness in terms of users and supporting developers, vendors, services. In this regard it seems Google Now and Viv are best positioned to succeed by virtue of pervasiveness and openness, respectively.
But Microsoft does have a chance at pre-empting, but it'll require it to think of Cortana not as a feature, but as a platform. And on that note, it may be imperative to push Cortana the service on iOS and Android.
Cue pain and anguish.
Okay, let's think about this logically. If much of Cortana is online and web based, would going cross-platform really hurt? At the end of the day, its functions using Windows Phone's native capabilities are finite, at some point they will be complete.
Secondly, if Cortana was viewed as a pervasive entity, the incentive for developers, vendors and services to link up to it will be stronger. If the core standards(for doing reservations, payment, etc) for Cortana were kept common across platforms, then theoretically Windows, WP and Xbox could benefit from a halo effect.
Just to be fair, Cortana should go beyond just operating systems, I am thinking internet-of-things as well. Cortana should be available for use by wearables, appliances, cars, etc.
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