Meet Viv - your new artificial assistant

But artificial intelligence isn't some far-off fantasy imagined by a science fiction film-maker or writers. It's here, and only going to get better. From Stanley Kubrick's HAL 9000 in his 1968 sci-fi classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, to Samantha, the AI assistant that Joaquin Phoenix fell in love with in Spike Jonze's film Her, humanity has long dreamt of the day it can just talk to its computers. And some very bright people indeed are betting this will be the way we'll all interact with our computers very soon. We've all heard of Siri, of course – Apple's AI assistant, built right into the iPhone and iPad.