Source: Viv Labs

Dag Kittlaus, founder and CEO of Siri, Inc., produced and uploaded an app into the Apple App store February 2010. The app quickly rose to 1st in the ‘Lifestyle Section.’ In March, Steve Jobs called Kittlaus to start a dialogue which led to Apple acquiring Siri shortly thereafter in April.

Siri cost Apple around $200 million. In addition to the acquisition of the technology, the purchase was also a smart competitive move because Siri was working on adapting the app to work on Nokia and Android phones. At the time they sold the company to Apple, Siri had 24 employees. As the team moved into the Apple apparatus, and for the next 18 months, Kittlaus headed the team at Apple that applied Siri technology to the iPhone 4S which was launched in October 2011, the month Steve Jobs died.

The Siri app was free for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch users. The algorithms that made the app work, however, were the product of years of defense-sponsored research at SRI International. SRI spun out Siri, Inc. in 2008 to commercialize their work. This included the three Siri founders: Kittlaus, Tom Gruber, CTO, and Adam Cheyer, VP Engineering. They named the company “Siri,” a Norwegian girls’ name. Silicon Valley venture capital firms Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures poured $24 million into the technology that Kittlaus, Gruber and Cheyer built into the Siri app.

After Jobs died, Kittlaus resigned and went back to Chicago to be near his family. Liv, his mother, was a native of Norway, and met Dag’s father, Karl, when he was serving with the U.S. Air Force in France. The couple settled in Palos Heights, Ill., a Chicago suburb, and had two sons. Whenever possible, Liv took them to visit her parents and sister in Norway. Doug went to Norway and completed his MBA at BI Norwegian Business School, in Oslo and stayed in Norway for seven more years. He began his career in technology at the Scandinavian telecom giant, Telenor Mobile. Returning to the United States, he worked at Motorola for five years and then went to work with SRI and the Siri project.

Source: YouTube/TechCrunch

In 2012 Kittlaus and a small group – including Cheyer and Brigham – created a new startup, Viv Labs and their AI Viv, named after Kittlaus’ mother but also the Latin root meaning live. In May 2016, Kittlaus demonstrated Viv at a TechCrunch Disrupt event in New York. The demonstration showed that Viv was a breakthrough accomplishment in providing a single conversational user interface (UI) to recognize our words, determine our intent, and then write code to effect that intent. At the demonstration, Kittlaus said that search wasn’t going anywhere but as Viv and other new AI assistants become more capable and become the primary resource for users, people really won’t want to go back to the old way.

Now enter Samsung, 5G, and the Internet of Things. On October 5, 2016, Samsung announced that it had acquired Viv Labs for an undisclosed amount. As part of the acquisition, the Viv founding team will work closely with Samsung’s Mobile Communications business but continue to operate independently.

“Unlike other existing AI-based services, Viv has a sophisticated natural language understanding, machine learning capabilities and strategic partnerships that will enrich a broader service ecosystem,” said Injong Rhee, CTO of the Mobile Communications business at Samsung Electronics. “Viv was built with both consumers and developers in mind. This dual focus is also what attracted us to Viv as an ideal candidate to integrate with Samsung home appliances, wearables and more, as the paradigm of how we interact with technology shifts to intelligent interfaces and voice control.”

In addition to their phone business, as we near 2020, when the new 5G telecom systems begin to be deployed, starting first in Korea in 2018 and Asia in 2019 and 2020, appliance makers such as Korean Samsung foresee the interaction of their devices with the Internet in all sorts of ways. Machine-to-machine technology, including robots, self-driving cars and other cognitive computing systems that are able to make decisions and solve problems without human intervention, is here now but growing in capabilities daily, and will soon be engrained in our daily lives as the capabilities of the 5G networks kick in. Human-machine-interaction, such as that offered by Viv, will be facilitated by 5G.

[NOTE: Samsung isn’t the only buyer of this type of UI technology. Last month Google acquired API.ai, a 2011 startup providing a virtual digital assistant. In December 2014, the company pivoted to focus on becoming a developer platform for natural language processing (NLP). Their platform enables developers to create their own voice apps across a range of end markets, including the mobile device, wearables, robotics, automotive, and smart home markets.]

{NOTE 2: In a move similar to Samsung’s acquisition of Viv to enable integrating it with Samsung home appliances, Amazon just partnered with KITT.ai, another developer of conversation-driven interfaces for developers, to make it easier for developers to use voice-controlled products using the Alexa Voice Service.].

What is 5G?

5G is the fifth generation of wireless technology and offers big advances in the number of simultaneous connections that mobile networks can support – up to a million connections per 1/3 mile. Apart from providing massive capacity, 5G users will see significantly improved network speeds and low latency, well beyond the capabilities of 4G. Data speeds on 5G are estimated to reach 20 times faster than current 4G networks. Estimates suggest that 5G users would be able to download a full-length, high-definition movie in just one second. In addition, 5G is expected to come with an ultra-low latency rate of less than 1 millisecond. Existing 4G networks have a latency of 10 milliseconds. Latency is defined as the amount of time it takes for a packet of data to get from one point to another. The ultra low latency also means that advanced applications, such as autonomous driving, can be supported by 5G networks with precision.

Bottom line

Personal assistants are all about simplifying the process of performing daily tasks. They are what you would expect from a knowledgeable executive assistant to maximize productivity and minimize your involvement, a person who really knows you and doesn’t require you to explain things again over and over. The list of vendors is impressive: Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, Baidu, Microsoft, Apple, SoftBank, all the car companies, smaller companies like Jibo, and many large consumer product providers – including Samsung.

To date, none have achieved that sweet spot where end users are fully satisfied. The holdup has been the software, the need for extensive coding, and the ability to identify “intent” from sounds recognized as words. The breakthrough technology that Viv is offering is a way to change the way programmers work with computers and developers offer their products. Programmers will no longer have to instruct step-by-step procedures in rigid code, but instead they’ll just have to describe the process and intent and the AI will develop the code – it will write the programs needed on the fly. And developers will just need to add Viv as their conversational UI.

Source: Viv Labs

Artificial intelligence that programs itself on the fly – from the team that developed Siri at SRI and Apple – was demonstrated this week in New York and it quickly performed complex spoken tasks, live and onstage. 

At the recent TechCrunch Disrupt event, held in New York City May 9-11, Dag Kittlaus unveiled Viv, the new single-source cross-platform voice assistant for the thousands of apps available to us. Viv describes itself as an AI platform that enables developers to distribute their products through an intelligent, conversational interface. Kittlaus expects to offer Viv SDKs to developers in the fall and hopes to fully launch by the end of 2016.

In the video below of his 14-minute presentation and demo, with another 10 minutes of Q&A afterwards, one can easily imagine how Viv will soon become integral to the way we use and operate our apps. Viv provides a paradigm shift in the way we affect our daily tasks — the very shift that others are attempting to provide in the form of personal assistants. It is a breakthrough accomplishment in providing a single conversational user interface (UI) to recognize our words, determine our intent, and then write code to affect that intent. As a side benefit, the video is very informative about the process of AI. [Forward to 4:00 and watch for 10 minutes just to see the demos and skip the intro and Q&A.]

Jibo, Pepper, Alexa, Duer, Cortana, Google, Watson and many others (startups are popping up every few days) are all in various stages of presenting and bringing to market their versions of personal assistants – some physical, others virtual.

But the Viv demo – done live – was speedier than any and Kittlaus explained why: because as more and more apps become available, and as more and more users want to use some of those apps, a personal assistant must scale to handle all those functions and the larger the scale, the more complex it becomes, the more lines of code that must be written, and it ultimately will slow down. Conversely Viv has a dynamic program generator that writes solution-based code from the intent of the user. In other words, Viv’s AI parses through the words you say to determine intent and then writes only the software that meets the specific task requested and does it quickly. The video also shows, but doesn’t detail, how Viv determines intent (goals) from the words. It breaks down the conversation into goals and values within thereby instructing the dynamic program generator which apps are required and what the parameters are for those apps.

Is Viv going to eliminate Google as the middleman? Kittlaus says that search isn’t going anywhere but as Viv and other new AI assistants become more capable and become the primary resource for users, people really won’t want to go back to the old way.

Siri, co-founded by SRI’s Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer and by Tom Gruber, was spun-out from the SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center and acquired by Apple for $200 million in 2010. Kittlaus left Apple in 2011; Cheyer left in 2012.

BOTTOM LINE

Personal assistants are all about simplifying the process of performing daily tasks. They are attempting to be what you would expect of a knowledgeable executive assistant working alongside to maximize your productivity and minimize your involvement, a person who really knows you and doesn’t need you to reexplain things over and over. The list of vendors is impressive: Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, Baidu, Microsoft, Apple, SoftBank, all the car companies, many large consumer product providers and smaller companies like Jibo. To date, none have achieved that sweet spot where end users are fully satisfied.

The holdup has been the software, the need for extensive coding, and the ability to identify “intent” from sounds recognized as words. The breakthrough technology that Viv is offering is a way to change the way programmers work with computers and developers offer their products. Programmers will no longer have to instruct step-by-step procedures in rigid code, but instead they’ll just have to describe the process and intent and the AI will develop the code – it will write the programs needed on the fly.  And developers will just need to add Viv as their conversational UI.

[Viv uses Nuance for voice recognition. Nuance is a member of the ROBO Global Robotics and Automation Index (of which I am a Co-founder)].

Source: YouTube/TechCrunch

Viv is an AI personal assistant launched at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. It promises to radically simplify our interface with everything. Viv is everything that Siri cofounders — Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer — wanted to build with Siri, but couldn’t. Viv is a few years more advanced than Siri, but the big difference is that Steve Jobs preferred to keep Siri in a walled garden and not allow open partnerships.

Viv is a global platform that enables developers to plug into and create an intelligent, conversational interface to anything.

Cheyer and Kittlaus are focusing on creating a developer ecosystem so that Viv will be the way every device interacts with you in the future. They believe no one company can bring everything you need. But, one personal assistant can interact with all the companies and services that you need.

Viv does ‘conversational commerce’ with breathtaking speed and accuracy. I think you can forget about deep linking as the next mobile/online paradigm. Kittlaus described Viv as “the next major marketplace and channel for offering content, commerce and services.”

Viv will launch a gradually expanding developer program later in 2016. And as thousands and thousands of developers add to the Viv intelligence, the power of Viv expands. While the demo focused on showing Viv’s strengths on a phone, Viv is clearly intended to be the interface for all of our smart connected devices. And robots.

In fact, I’ll bet that my future home robot will be running on Viv.

Is there a downside?

What are could possibly go wrong in a future world full of personal assistants?

Well, while Dag Kittlaus was launching Viv at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, cofounder Adam Cheyer was in San Jose on the CHI2016 panel: “On the Future of Personal Assistants” with Phil Cohen,VoiceBox Technologies; Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Research; Rana El Kaliouby, Affectiva; and Steve Whittaker, University of California at Santa Cruz.

Firstly, the panel noted that the term ‘personal assistant’ was deceptive as we are transitioning from helpful but passive assistants, such as Siri, to active agents, such as Echo, Viv and perhaps Jibo, or other home robots in the future.

Assistants are just helpful. Agents go out into the world and perform actions.” said Phil Cohen, VoiceBox.

There are also huge potential implications in the transition from personal assistants to family assistants. Amazon’s Echo is an example of a family assistant, where the device is no longer in our hands or pockets, but sits in a room and interacts with a range of people.

How do we deal with multiple devices in various areas of our lives, ie. from car to kitchen to work to bed, and then, how do devices interact across our individual family members? Will we be creating functional or dysfunctional family agents? Navigating these issues of privacy, trust and boundaries should be at the forefront of our development.

Eric Horvitz, Microsoft, described the ‘penumbra – or bubble of data and devices’ that travels with each individual. We expect these agents to collaborate with us, but who else do our agents collaborate with in order to provide us services?

The next step is to consider how our agents can in the future interpret our emotional states. What inferences can be made, and shared, with whom? What control can be effected by these agents.

Rana El Kaliouby, Affectiva said “your fridge will understand your emotional state and help you make better decisions, if you want to change your behavior. That’s a very powerful promise.”

Cheyer was clear he doesn’t want “a plethora of different assistants… I want one assistant who can learn my preferences over time and do a better job.”

Although the intelligence might be in the cloud, the form factor of the device will give very different feel to how we interact, whether it’s a screen, TV, or a robot. And as we start to embody our assistants we change the relationship significantly.

Horvitz told an anecdote about going on holidays and turning back to bring Alexa along. Kind of like a member of the family.

Steve Whittaker, UCSC said that “we can use the metaphor of a house as an approach to designing different categories of personal assistants. A house is a collection of resources for family activities. At some level they are shared facilities for a family, but it is segmented.”

“Cortana developers are already tackling ideas of primary agency,” said Horvitz. “When I walk into a room, can I use someone else’s agent? And then is it my agent or some one else’s? And what level of shared agent? How do we develop the trust?”

“Both technically and ethically, how much access to the underlying personal information can someone else’s agent have?” added El Kaliouby.

Phil Cohen, VoiceBox questioned whether agents needed to track our beliefs, desires and intentions, or underlying emotions.

“What value or service is augmented intelligence providing in people’s lives? What tasks should a system be designed to address and for whom? Especially when a device is ambient (taking action on its own) not simply being addressed.”

 

Cheyer said that a useful assistant has to be transparent and allow you to change your mind about what is being shared. Whittaker said that while that might be the case for personal agents it would be very complex for family agents.

Horvitz pointed out that there are many elegant designers in the CHI community who can meet the challenge, as long as we focus on high value services that are tolerant of some uncertainty or error, so that there is a low cost of failure.

El Kaliouby added that we faced a moral obligation to give permission to some algorithms to take action. For example, some agents are showing ability to spot depression and suicidal states from things like social media posts. But what permission to they have to take action and what actions?

Whittaker pointed out that while spotting suicidal behaviors is a clear social good, generally people aren’t that good at identifying and tracking emotional states, so at what point does mood tracking create useful and actionable information?

Horvitz would like to see us address time management for people, seeing it as a huge problem that we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of.

Cheyer sees time management or life coaching as just one of the domains that a system like Viv will start to have impact on. Although we’ll need better understanding of how we interact with AI and devices to be able to get to the next level: “Everyone is talking about the strengths of AI, but it’s not really going to solve all our problems. Where Siri was pretty dumb, Viv has light weight planning ability. Viv is able to do complex tasks with several steps which is a lot closer to the way we really ask for things. It’s not going to be doing the life planning things that Eric was asking for. But we’re working on taking actionable insights out of the unstructured data of our lives. And in the end that’s a very exciting development across all domains.”

In a room full of interactionists and ethicists, it’s no surprise that the first question to the panel was: “Is it good for society to be creating a slave class?”

This opened the door on a discussion that ranged from the ethics of ‘nagware’ up to lethal force. At which point the challenge was made for designers shift away from negativity and to create delightful solutions that would enhance and improve our lives. People-centered rather than task-centered design.

Cheyer concluded by bringing the discussion back to Viv. “Every 10 years if you look back we’ve had a new paradigm for interacting with our devices, from desktops, to web, to mobile. And each one had its problems. But I think the time is right for the assistant/agent paradigm and it’s going to be far more impactful than everyone realizes.”

Horvitz added, “The only thing I can promise for sure in the next 5 to 10 years is that we will have impacts and effects that no one has predicted.”

*note: quotes are not verbatim and have been edited for clarity.