A team of engineers who worked on Siri, Apple’s virtual personal assistant, have joined forces to form a new startup company, Viv Labs, in order to work on a new personal assistant with true artificial intelligence.
The vision described by the team in a lengthy piece in Wired is certainly ambitious. The problem with Siri, they say, is that it can only do things it has been explicitly programmed to do.
“Siri is chapter one of a much longer, bigger story,” says Dag Kittlaus, one of the original creators of Apple’s virtual personal assistant.
Though Apple has since extended Siri’s powers—to make an OpenTable restaurant reservation, for example—she still can’t do something as simple as booking a table on the next available night in your schedule. She knows how to check your calendar and she knows how to use OpenTable. But putting those things together is, at the moment, beyond her.
Kittlaus and his team want to create an assistant who can learn to do things for herself. The secret is in giving the system access to as many sources of information as possible, and then allowing it to intelligently combine the information, in order to make sense of requests.
One engineer explains how he has been refining Viv’s response to “Get me a ticket to the cheapest flight from SFO to Charles de Gaulle on July 2, with a return flight the following Monday.” In the past week, the engineer added an airplane-seating database. Using a laptop-based prototype of Viv that displays a virtual phone screen, he speaks into the microphone. Lufthansa Flight 455 fits the bill. “Seat 61G is available according to your preferences,” Viv replies, then purchases the seat using a credit card.
Viv wouldn’t be tied to one particular piece of hardware or operating system, instead it would be licensed to anyone who wanted to use it, such as travel websites, or television manufacturers.
Viv admits they are at an early stage of development with Viv, but one outsider who tried out the current version of Viv was “blown away” by it.
Vishal Sharma was until recently VP of product for Google Now. When Cheyer showed him how Viv located the closest bottle of wine that paired well with a dish, he was blown away. “I don’t know any system in the world that could answer a question like that,” he says. “Many things can go wrong, but I would like to see something like this exist.”
The full story about Viv can be read at the Wired website.
