The voice-controlled assistance market reached a new high this week with the launch of Viv, an artificial intelligence (AI) system that is piped to be “the intelligent interface for everything.”     Built by the same people who originally designed Siri, prior to it being acquired by Apple, Viv (which means ‘life’ apparently) is aptly being described as Son of Siri or Siri 2.0. The first public demo took place onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY on Monday, following four years of development. Dag Kittlaus, one of Siri’s founding fathers, gave the presentation and described how Viv would come to “breathe life into the inanimate objects of our life through conversation.” What’s exciting us about Viv is its AI capabilities, and the fact that it’s being pitched as far more than a virtual assistant, with some industry insiders claiming it could feasibly emerge as a challenger to Google. According to reports there have already been acquisition offers from Google and others, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is an indirect investor. Viv has been built using an open, third-party ecosystem, which creates myriad opportunities for the interface to be “trained-up” by developers. This also puts it in an interesting place, alongside Google. The issue, as with the original vision for Siri, is deciding who fulfils the request. “No one company has the resources to plug in every one of the different services you might want to use with your assistant,” claims Kittlaus. Towards the end of last year Google released a study of 1,400 Americans looking at their use of voice search. It found that 55% of teens and 41% of adults surveyed used voice search, and more than once a day. Around the same time, technology firm MindMeld commissioned research of 1,800 adult smartphone users in the US, and found that there had been a big upsurge in voice assistant and voice search usage, with 60% saying that they had started using such tools in the past 12 months (including 41% within the past six months). Within the study, Siri emerged as the primary voice assistant (40%), with Google trailing a little behind at 26%. To date, voice assistant Hound has arguably been the most interesting contender within the voice assistant space, but Viv’s AI sophistication, and its ability to understand intent particularly, places it in a league of its own. Within the TechCrunch demonstration, Kittlaus called on Viv to pay a friend $20, and what followed was a tap of the pay button through an integration with