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.

Stunning new pictures from a 1946 atomic weapon test on a hundred US ships have been revealed. The newly declassified images show the World War II veteran aircraft carrier USS Independence, which was one of nearly a hundred ships used as targets in the first tests of the atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in the summer of 1946. The two Bikini tests known as Operation Crossroads were carried out in the immediate aftermath of the atomic end to World War II in Japan, and signaled a new era in world history, the historians involved in the new study say. The newly declassified images show the World War II aircraft carrier which was one of nearly a hundred ships used as targets in the first tests of the atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in 1946. Here, Sailors watch the'Able Test' burst miles out to sea from the deck of the support ship USS Fall River on 1 July 1946.

Three weeks ago we reported an amusing anecdote out of China in which robot waiters in a Guangzhou restaurant had been "fired" because whencustomers flocked to the Heweilai Restaurant chain in the southern Chinese city, they found they were not all they are cracked up to be. "A staff member said the robots couldn't effectively handle soup dishes, often malfunctioned, and had to follow a fixed route that sometimes resulted in clashes. A customer also said the robots were unable to do tasks such as topping up water or placing a dish on the table." "The robots weren't able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again," said one employee. We joked in the summary saying that "for now, it appears, China's minimum wage workers, and it has a few hundred million of those, will not be phased out just yet." According to a report released by the MIT Technology Review, where some saw failure in China's "novelty" worker robots, the Chinese government saw nothing less than the opportunity to perfect what will soon put million of Chinese workers out of a job: an army of worker robots. Because while there is certanly humor to be found in the anecdote about a robot "termination", the Chinese government is keen to change this.