Creators of Apple’s Siri Are Set To Unveil A Next-generation AI

The creators of Siri are getting ready to reveal their next major personal assistant, called Viv.

Powered by artificial intelligence and organized data, Viv comes from a 26-person startup based in San Jose called Viv Labs which says it will reveal the product on Monday.

According to the Washington Post, Viv’s conversation-style assistance doesn’t require the need to open other apps and will likely be used in smart devices, homes, cars and other areas. It can do things like order a pizza, from customizing toppings to providing the address for delivery, without having to make a call or go to an app. The capability is similar to the “Alexa” software used in Amazon’s Echo device.

While personal assistants have made a lot of improvement in the past couple of years, there are still unrefined nuances that tend to offer scripted replies and at times, inaccurate results.

Viv’s creators, Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, were also co-founders of Siri. Siri was spun out of Stanford Research Institute in 2007 and was bought by Apple in 2010 for a reported $200 million.

Kittlaus and Cheyer will be showing Viv’s first-ever public demo at Tech Crunch’s Distrupt NY on Monday.

But there’s also a business case for more conversational assistants too. Companies see it as a middle man between businesses and their customers.

So far, Viv isn’t yet publicly available to consumers, but there are interested parties. Alphabet and Facebook have made bids to buy Viv and its technology, the Post reported, citing unnamed sources.

Viv Lab’s website states it is “a global platform that enables developers to plug into and create an intelligent, conversational interface to anything.” The team’s goal is “ubiquity,” Kittlaus said in the Post article. “There’s no way to predict where that goes except to say we’ll pick the path that gets us there. Either way, we will finish the job.”

Viv co-creator Dag Kittlaus told the Post he’s also chatting with car makers, TV companies and other media firms about integrating their products with Viv.

Among those competing to find the next generation of artificial-intelligence technology is Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon, each of whom have invested heavily in the field over the past year.

Apple has long had visions of the perfect personal assistant. In the 1980s, the Cupertino company predicted the future of a conversational assistant that would help in everything from the kitchen to the classrooms ( you can watch it here). According to the Post, Steve Jobs six years ago invited the Viv co-founders to his Palo Alto home for a three-hour conversation.

Google has its own personal assistant with Cortana and, in a letter to shareholders last week, said the Mountain View company will be prioritizing artificial intelligence. The company also is pushing an effort called the “Physical Web” that enables all connected devices to work in unison without the need for separate apps.

Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, is perhaps the most conversational personal assistant, handling a variety of requests from sports scores to product ordering to music playing.

At its annual developers conference last week, Samsung revealed its own personal assistant in the form of a table-top robot called “Otto” that can take pictures and respond to voice commands and questions from within a room.

Facebook, recently has been trying to make its popular Messenger app into a business platform. At its annual developer conference last month, Facebook demoed several companies including Expedia and 1-800-Flowers.com conducting more conversational customer service.

Matt Maloney, chief executive of Boston-based delivery app Grubhub, told the Post he rushed to sign up with Viv two years ago because users didn’t have to toggle between devices. “No one has been able to say, ‘I want the movie ticket, and the bottle of wine, and some flowers on the side’ — all in one breath,” he said.

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal, Jennifer Elias
Photo: Siri has even more competition coming its way. (Ian Waldie)