Viv Labs Looks To Build the Global Brain

 Artificial Intelligence  

Part of the growing explosion of artificial intelligence systems, Viv, coming soon from the original team behind Apple's Siri, looks to release a virtual assistant that can actually learn about you and your needs.

At the stealth start-up called Viv Labs a small team of engineers claim to be on the verge of realizing an advanced form of AI assistant. As the minds behind Apple's Siri, they are definitely worth listening to.

As part of the growing explosion of artificial intelligence systems, Viv Labs is contributing to the field, and looking ahead.  “Siri is chapter one of a much longer, bigger story,” says Dag Kittlaus, one of Viv’s co-founders.

Kittlaus, and cofounders, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham believe we will all have our own virtual assistant one day. The system will do everything for you – book your flight, make your hotel reservation, remind you to pick up your child from school, and order your next pizza. There are many pieces to this puzzle for it to work. The first one is voice recognition. The second piece is extremely deep domain expertise. For example, in order to book a flight, you need many inputs and access to various websites or travel agents to do the booking.

While Siri, has been explicitly programmed for responses, Viv, say the start-up's founders, will be able to teach itself, opening up almost limitless capabilities. “I want to do something bigger than mobile, bigger than consumer, bigger than desktop or enterprise. I want to do something that could fundamentally change the way software is built,” Cheyer says.

Viv will be able to use your personal preferences and a near-infinite web of connections to answer almost any query and perform almost any function.

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Viv's creators want to make the first consumer-friendly software assistant that truly achieves the initial promise of Siri. They want to make it smart and infinitely flexible and omnipresent. They hope that some day soon it will be embedded in a plethora of Internet-connected everyday objects. Viv founders claim you will use the artificial intelligence system as a utility, the way you draw on electricity. Simply by speaking, you will connect to what they are calling “a global brain.” And that brain can help power a million different apps and devices.

According to the Viv Labs website:

Viv is a global platform that enables developers to plug into and create an intelligent, conversational interface to anything. It is the simplest way for the world to interact with devices, services and things everywhere. Viv is taught by the world, knows more than it is taught, and learns every day.

"Siri is chapter one of a much longer, bigger story."

Viv’s founders don’t see it as just one product tied to a hardware manufacturer. They see it as a service that can be licensed. They imagine that everyone from TV manufacturers and car companies to app developers will want to incorporate Viv’s AI. They see its icon joining the pantheon of familiar symbols like Power On, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

Quite a few things have to go right for Viv to make good on its founders’ promises. It has to prove that its code-making skills can scale to include petabytes of data. It has to continually get smarter through self-learning, and it has to win users, and developers despite not having a preexisting base like Google and Apple have.

Moreover, writes Wired's Steven Levy, "it has to be as seductive as Scarlett Johansson in Her so that people are comfortable sharing their personal information with a robot that might become one of the most important forces in their lives."

When Viv is released, the competition between Siri, Google Now, Amazon’s Fire TV voice, Cortana, and more should heat up even more.

SOURCE  Viv Labs, Wired

By 33rd Square

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