If you think Siri is cool, wait until you get a load of Viv
Most of us take Siri for granted, and it lives on the iOS devices of hundreds of millions of Apple users. Few people really think about what’s become of the handful of people responsibile for getting the virtual assistant out of imagination and into our phones, but it turns out they’re now working on something even cooler and more advanced.
Meet Dag Kittlaus, cofounder of Siri
Dag Kittlaus was the cofounder and CEO of Siri before it was acquired by Apple in 2010. At that point, Kittlaus become a director of iPhone apps at Apple, and was responsible for managing the Siri and speech recognition teams. Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham, veterans who worked with Kittlaus before the acquisition, soon joined Kittlaus at Apple.
Eventually, the three left to work on the next generation of artificial intelligence, and Kittlaus cofounded Viv in 2012. Viv aims to open up artificial intelligence to the world and “enable everyone to talk to everything.” The goal of Viv is to become a platform that developers can use to add a Siri-like intelligent, conversational interface to anything they can imagine.
This concept isn’t unheard of, given Amazon’s forays into the field by enabling Alexa, the personal assistant inside devices like the Amazon Echo and Amazon Fire TV, to be used by developers in other contexts. The difference, though, is that nothing really outstanding has come out of Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service other than the company’s own products. Viv sounds to be different and already in the process of being embedded in other products and services.
Kittlaus will be talking about Viv at TechCrunch’s Disrupt NY 2016 event, held May 9 through May 11 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, United States. It should be an exciting presentation, as Kittlaus showcases some of the apps, systems, and experiences that Viv is embedded in.