Two creators of Siri, Apple's virtual assistant for the iPhone and iPad, are reportedly preparing to unveil a new AI bot on Monday that they say will take the technology to the next level. Viv's capabilities will be demonstrated for the first time at a major industry conference on Monday, the Washington Post reported. It is among the most anticipated offerings in the artificial intelligence field in which Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon.com Intended to be essentially a better version of Siri, the developers want consumers to be able to get a pizza delivered, for example, without needing to phone, fill out a form online or use a restaurant app. All you would have to do is tell Viv what pizza you want and from where.

Next week, a new digital assistant launches – and it's supposed to be the most powerful yet. It's called Viv, and it's been in the making for four years, according to an article at the Washington Post. Viv is the brainchild of the same engineers that created Siri, the digital assistant first introduced on Apple's iPhone 4S in 2011. Since then, tech companies have been scrambling to introduce the next big thing in artificial intelligence, from Microsoft's Cortana to Google Now. Yet, it seems that none have cracked the code to a true AI-centric future.

At this spring's Hack Upstate event my team build an Amazon Alexa skill. I came up with the idea of creating a murder mystery game that involved interaction with Alexa because I saw it as an opportunity to force a collision between the world I am immersed in (writing and content creation) and the world I am moving towards (programming and data analysis). I've been considering how these two spheres of knowledge interact for quite some time. My education in writing was earned through years of participation in groups, through classes and through degrees, whereas my education in programming has been primarily self-taught, ad hoc and in general, isolated, with only brief forays into makeshift classrooms. I've learned that these are two very different styles of thinking, very different processes and at times, contrast rather sharply.

All of the digital recordings started happening seriously, I guess, at the beginning of the millennium, and I did the basic vocabulary that turned into Siri in the year 2005. I recorded for the whole month of July -- four hours a day, five days a week. At the time I was working for a company that did a lot of on-hold messaging, which I've always done and continue to do. This was sort of a new thing. They were recording phrases and sentences that were sort of odd because they were solely created to get every sound combination in the language.

When you're dealing with software such as Google Search or virtual assistants like Apple's Siri, there's not an awful lot of friendliness or emotion in the exchange – and any warmth you can find has probably been deliberately programmed in by human software engineers (like Siri's famous easter eggs). But now Google is working on a solution, and it's looking for love in perhaps the most obvious of places: romance novels. The company is feeding romance novels – thousands of them – to one of its artificial intelligence (AI) engines, in a bid to enhance the software's personality and people skills. "In the Google app, the responses are very factual," Google software engineer Andrew Dai told Alex Kantrowitz at BuzzFeed News. "Hopefully with this work, and future work, it can be more conversational, or can have a more varied tone, or style, or register."

Long a fixture of science fiction, artificial intelligence is now part of our daily lives, even if we do not realize it. Through the use of sophisticated machine learning algorithms, for example, computers now work to filter out spam messages automatically from our email. Algorithms also identify us by our photos on Facebook, match us with new friends on online dating sites, and suggest movies to watch on Netflix.

Subscribe to the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast to explore the opportunities and techniques driving big data and data science. Find us on Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS. In this episode of the O'Reilly Data Show, I spoke with Danny Bickson, co-founder and VP at Dato, and the principal organizer of the Data Science Summit (full disclosure: I'm a member of the conference organizing committee). Among machine learning students and practitioners, recommender systems have become somewhat of a canonical use case and application. One of the early and popular building blocks was GraphLab's collaborative filtering toolkit, a library originally written and maintained by Bickson.

Siri has been gradually getting better since its debut in 2011, but some of its original creators are set to introduce its successor, Viv, next week -- and, by all accounts, Siri better watch her back! Having operated in stealth mode for more than a year, Viv's arrival hopes to represent a significant step forward in artificial intelligence as AI assistants take on more of an active role in running our lives. It would be great to think so. One area Viv reportedly excels in is longer conversations, where a tool like Siri is likely to get lost. "Get me a pizza from Pizz'a Chicago near my office," one of the engineers said into his smartphone. It was their first real test of Viv … Everyone was a little nervous.

Siri, the velvet-voiced iOS assistant that can give you directions, beatbox, do math and chat with you about Game of Thrones, is usually associated with Apple. But Siri was not originally made by Apple; it was launched in 2007 by Stanford Research Institute as a spin-off company, led by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Tom Gruber, and was sold to Apple in 2010. Six years later, Cheyer and Kittlaus are back with a new product called Viv which, according to the Washington Post, will be publicly demonstrated at an industry conference Monday. SEE ALSO: Siri makes a much worse Hal in this '2001: A Space Odyssey' edit Viv, which has been in development for several years and received 12.5 million in funding in February 2015, will be able to take things one step further than Siri -- it will actually let you do stuff without ever touching your phone or downloading an app. Ordering a pizza from start to finish or getting an Uber car in front of your house are some of the examples (Siri can help you order a pizza, but you can't actually finish the order without tapping something on your phone).

Sometimes the greatest pain of a customer service leader is the buzz of a new technology that results in a Sunday night CEO email asking "when are we going to get this"? In 2016, the leading contender has to be Artificial Intelligence (AI). It seems at every turn we're seeing AI show up, whether it's in the form of toys like Mattel's new Barbie doll, Amazon's Echo or IBM going big with the Watson TV spots featuring major celebrities. As AI enters our technology lexicon it begs the question: How does AI fit into a customer service strategy? The first place to impact the customer experience is by applying AI to self-service channels.