[Art]

If the developers of this conversational A.I. get their way then yes.
Viv will be at the forefront and at the very center of the Internet Of Things.

http://viv.ai/

The video is about 28 minutes in length with the first part about 15 minutes, then a Q & A for the remainder.
Overall, it's a quite interesting and informative look into our possible future.

[ivan.moony]

It depends on crowdsourced support. It seems to me that site maintainers have to build their sites in specific way to support Viv. Could work, as probably there is a public programming library to do this, but it depends on each store instance (as far as I can tell).

I think that the web is very inert in accepting new standards, but I wish them all luck. The world could be a great place, once we agree on how to behave in it (meaning: once it is standardized).

[Art]

According to the article, there are quite a few "Big Name" companies already on board for this Conversational A.I. to take place. We're talking billions of dollars...not just a few crowd sourcing ones. I know what you mean. It's ultimately how readily we the people are to allow such interconnectivity into our everyday lives.

We shall see and yes, let's hope that the people deciding what's "best for us" don't have their own agendas in the forefront, ahead of ours! (crossed fingers).

[Don Patrick]

Viv is a great improvement in terms of A.I. and utility. But remember all those robotics companies Google bought a while back that was going to be the next big thing? They sold them all later, and the internet of things has been a dormant hype for quite some time, its use limited to the luxurious.

There are two major issues I see with Viv. One is that you have to give up some control to use it, particularly some control over your bank account, as it decides things like shipping options autonomously. People may not be comfortable with that unless you can customise it. The second is that this untransparent system, with advertisement rates for partner stores and companies that Viv selects for you, is highly corruptable.

I think Viv is a very good development, but at least in my country this isn't going to catch on. Perhaps as the years pass we will slowly become used to using virtual assistants for things like scheduling meetings, but I wouldn't bet my money on it now.

[ivan.moony]

Imagine what would AGI do

Upon some request, it would open a web browser (off screen), navigate to relevant site, pass some actions through virtual mouse and keyboard, log out from the site and report results to the user. Nice and clean, no support libraries, no ad-hoc solutions. All you need is off screen web browser.

[DemonRaven]

I have some major doubts that the big guns will have much better luck with chatbots then other more well known programmers have in the past. AI has  to be trained. There is no quick shortcut around it. To attempt to try to create one and let the public do it all for you leads to disaster as microsoft found out.