It may slip our notice, but technological innovation is often reducible to an innovation in the marketing and conceptualization of technology. Take Viv, the new personal assistant from the makers of Siri. It promises to simplify the process of ordering pizza or buying cinema tickets, allowing its users to perform such actions via a single voice-operated interface.
Like the earlier Siri, it’s being described as a “ virtual assistant ,” not least because it’s speech-operated and assists you in your daily, web-based business. Yet it could also be described as an “Internet intermediary,” or an “advanced search engine,” or an “online purchaser” since it will essentially serve as its users’ single point of contact for a host of websites and services, if not for most of the Internet itself.
That it’s classified as a “virtual assistant” rather than something like a “super search engine” is an important distinction, because the difference between the two terms encapsulates how technological advance is often an advance in what we say and think about technology. That’s not to say that there isn’t new code involved in Viv, but it is to say that the sense it or any similar app offers something radically new is partly engendered by the application of a new vocabulary to pre-existing kinds of technology.
This vocabulary involves such terms as “personal assistant,” “conversational technology” and “ intelligent interface ,” and it’s the introduction of this vocabulary into the world of search engines that’s largely responsible for making it seem as though Viv, or Siri, is doing something fundamentally different from what Google, Yahoo! or Bing is doing.
The thing is, Siri and Viv , or Cortana and M for that matter, are no more “personal assistants” than other technologies that apparently don’t warrant the name. Like Viv, your laptop is your “single […]
