That may be an exaggeration, but today some of Siri's original creators formally unveiled a next-generation assistant, known as Viv, that's capable of responding to far more complex questions or commands than current versions of Apple's bot by writing dynamic programs in real time to answer queries of all kinds. Not just asking a voice assistant what the weather is, but asking whether it will be warmer than 70 degrees near the Golden Gate Bridge the day after tomorrow, or if it rained in Seattle three Thursdays ago. Getting a bot to tell you the weather may seem trivial, but to hear Dag Kittlaus, Viv's cofounder and CEO, tell it at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York today, people want and need far more than that in their lives today, and the state of consumer voice assistants is ready to advance well beyond what's possible with the tool built into millions of Apple devices. Our broad need for a single assistant that's personalized for us and knows our preferences, works across all our devices, and is infinitely extensible. Viv, which has been in stealth for four years, was founded by Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, who were original cofounders of Siri at Silicon Valley's SRI International.

Voice-controlled assistance is seeing another evolution as it looks to prove its worth as the next shift in human-computer interaction. Today, onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, Siri creator Dag Kittlaus showed off the first public demo of Viv, an AI virtual system that aims to be "the intelligent interface for everything." In a live presentation that mentioned the word "paradigm" at least a dozen times, Kittlaus talked a bit about the next wave of computer interaction methods and how Viv would come to "breathe life into the inanimate objects of our life through conversation." The live demo went off without any major glitches despite the laser-focused specificity of the queries all uttered onstage in front of an audience of hundreds. Kittlaus began with a broad and oft-uttered question regarding what the weather was like today, but then quickly evolved his demands of Viv into ludicrously complex pointed inquiries.

When it comes to AI and digital assistants, Dag Kittlaus brings a lot of gravitas to the table: he co-created Siri, which Apple later purchased and made the "voice" of iPhone. And now Kittlaus has co-created what may well be the next generation of Siri: Viv, a new AI startup that aims to replace the app world as we know it with natural language commands. Kittlaus provided the first public demo of Viv at New York's TechCrunch Disrupt event, deep within the Brooklyn Cruise terminal in Red Hook earlier today. It was the first glimpse of the tech that he aims to beat Siri, Google Now, Cortana and Amazon Alexa at their own game in a year where bots and artificial intelligence technology is suddenly all the rage. Viv had gathered some headlines over the last year or so, but this was the first chance to see Viv in action.

Bots and virtual assistants are here to help us with everyday tasks, but because they are scattered across networks and devices, their usefulness remains limited. Now a new product from the developers behind Apple's Siri is looking to connect them and create the world's first virtual assistant marketplace. In Viv's first live demo, Dag Kittlaus demonstrated Viv working across the apps of their "friends" at Weather Underground, Venmo, ProFlowers, Hotels.com and Uber while onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, the annual tech conference held this year in Brooklyn. "I just did four transactions in about two minutes, by talking," Kittlaus said simply after completing the demo. "What I just showed you is a small slice of where we see it headed. For developers, this is going to be the next big marketplace, the marketplace that works with the next generation of devices."

Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer created the artificial intelligence behind Siri, Apple's iconic digital assistant, and one of the first modern apps to capably handle natural language queries on a smartphone. Today the pair showed off their newest creation, Viv, a next generation AI assistant that they have been developing in stealth mode for the last four years. The goal was to create a better version of Siri, one that connected to a multitude of services, instead of routinely shuffling queries off to a basic web search. During a 20 minute demo onstage at Disrupt NYC, Viv flawlessly handled a dozen complex requests, not just in terms of comprehension, but by connecting with third-party merchants to purchase goods and book reservations. The major difference between Siri and Viv is that the latter is a far more open platform.

SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket on Friday and, despite the odds, landed the first stage on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean. A SpaceX Dragon cargo spaceship was grappled by the International Space Station's Canadarm2 on April 10, following an April 8 launch from Cape Canaveral. CAPE CANAVERAL -- The coming week is another big one for SpaceX, whose unmanned Dragon capsule is scheduled to depart the International Space Station and return to Earth on Wednesday morning. The station's 58-foot robotic arm is expected to release the Dragon and its 3,700 pounds of cargo at 9:18 a.m. Because of a failed launch last summer, this Dragon will be the first to return science experiments and hardware from the ISS in a year.

With Congress revisiting how Pentagon units share authority under the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, the intelligence agencies under the next presidential administration should likewise review their own unity of effort to become more agile and able to integrate, the top Defense intelligence official said Thursday. "The integration of intelligence of the past 15 years is a journey that is not finished," said Marcel Lettre, undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, at a banquet for agency and industry professionals in the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance. "I hope the new administration finds clear progress from the last 15 years and takes it on with a mantle of seriousness, or even sees an opportunity to redouble the effort." Lettre, who was sworn in in December to preside over a 17 billion budget, eight components and 110,000 employees, said he also hopes the next administration will "institutionalize and make irreversible" the intelligence community's digital data sharing modernization effort known as the Intelligence Community Information Technology Enterprise (pronounced "eyesight"). "Key critical data sets are the coin of the realm for the intel community," he said.

Google will team up with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles to develop their self-driving cars, the companies announced Tuesday. Google began working on autonomous driving technology in 2009, though the project wasn't publicly announced until a year later. Chrysler quickly attacked the concept in an ad for the new Dodge Charger: "Hands-free driving, cars that park themselves, an unmanned car driven by a search-engine company," intones the voice-over. It ends with robots harvesting our bodies for energy." Tuesday's announcement included news that the union will more than double Google's self-driving fleet, adding around 100 models of the 2017 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans.

Two EteRNA players check out a molecule designed using the online game. The display above shows output from a laser microscope that tests the new designs. Two EteRNA players check out a molecule designed using the online game. The display above shows output from a laser microscope that tests the new designs. Though it's the world's top infectious killer, tuberculosis is surprisingly tricky to diagnose.

Two EteRNA players check out a molecule designed using the online game. The display above shows output from a laser microscope that tests the new designs. Two EteRNA players check out a molecule designed using the online game. The display above shows output from a laser microscope that tests the new designs. Though it's the world's top infectious killer, tuberculosis is surprisingly tricky to diagnose.