Dag Kittlaus seeks to expand virtual assistant capabilities with "Viv"

Virtual assistant technology is rapidly spreading on smartphones and other devices, but there's a new player in the field that has caught the attention of Silicon Valley.

Dag Kittlaus, one of the masterminds behind Siri, now the ubiquitous helper available on Apple products, is looking to push the boundaries of what a virtual assistant can do with his new product, dubbed "Viv" and powered by artificial intelligence.

"So at its essence, most of the assistants that we use today do a few dozen things, so we want to open the system up and let developers build hundreds and thousands of times the number of capabilities," Kittlaus said. "So really it's an opening up of the system and letting the world teach it."

The CEO and co-founder distinguished his latest invention from Siri, saying that it requires a "completely new platform" that allows anyone to teach it.

"In Siri, Apple folks can teach it... but most of these platforms are very closed." Kittlaus explained on "CBS This Morning" Friday. "But this is a system where anyone can come in and add new capabilities on the fly."

Viv is still in its pre-launch phase, but Kittlaus previewed some of its capabilities, such as making reservations, booking travel and transferring money to friends.

When he asked the app when the band Animal Collective would play in New York, it pulled up the exact date and also generated a search for tickets on TicketMaster.

Viv's creators believe that they are "radically simplifying the world by providing an intelligent interface to everything."

"Well I think at the end of the day, you're going to be talking to more and more things. As speech recognition gets a lot better, as virtual assistants are far more capable, you're going to find you're using it in not just your phone but in your car and in your house and the number of things you're going to use it to do is going to vastly increase ," Kittlaus said.

Kittlaus urges any skeptics to try the technology themselves when the first version of Viv is released later this year.