This post was contributed by Rowan Benecke, Chair, Global Technology Practice. Let's think about what we as PR professionals do in a typical day. We read, analyze and answer email. We answer calls and make calls. We write press releases or pitches and we reach out to media.

The creators of Siri are back with a new, futuristic virtual assistant called Viv, and it's powered by artificial intelligence. After years of quiet development on Viv, the technology was demoed for the first time at the TechCrunch Disrupt Conference in Brooklyn on Monday.

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.

Siri co-founder and CEO Dag Kittlaus has been quietly working on a much-anticipated voice assistant powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning and integrations with third-party services. This product is called Viv and, in a world-first, Kittlaus just gave us a demo at TechCrunch Disrupt NY that shows off the power of what they've built with Viv. Like with Siri, Viv wants to build a conversational and smart layer that lets you interact with various services. But Viv is taking everything one step further. More importantly, there's a developer platform to add more services.

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."

Apple's Siri has a fantastic yet little-understood feature that brings a little artificial intelligence into every iOS user's life. Here is how to use it. Apple calls this feature Proactive and makes it mainly available through Siri. Proactive is context-based artificial intelligence solution the company intends will become more powerful than Google Now and more private than any other solution out there – even Royalty should be able to use it without being spied upon (and, by extension, anyone should enjoy equal levels of privacy). You access it using Siri and it can do things like show you photos you took last month to reminding you to do things when you get into or out of your car.

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.

Siri co-founder and CEO Dag Kittlaus has been quietly working on a much-anticipated voice assistant powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning and integrations with third-party services. This product is called Viv and, in a world first, Kittlaus just gave us a demo at TechCrunch Disrupt NY that shows off the power of what they've built with Viv. Like with Siri, Viv wants to build a conversational and smart layer that lets you interact with various services. But Viv is taking everything one step further. More importantly, there's a developer platform to add more services.

Natural language question understanding has been one of the most important challenges in artificial intelligence. Indeed, eminent AI benchmarks such as the Turing test require an AI system to understand natural language questions, with various topics and complexity, and then respond appropriately. During the past few years, we have witnessed rapid progress in question answering technology, with virtual assistants like Siri, Google Now, and Cortana answering daily life questions, and IBM Watson winning over humans in Jeopardy!. Many questions the systems encounter are simple lookup questions (e.g., "Where is Chichen Itza?" or "Who's the manager of Man Utd?"). The answers can be found by searching the surface forms.