In a recent interview with the Chicago Tribune, Dag Kittlaus, co-founder of Apple’s Siri, shared details of his new project, Viv Labs, a more sophisticated intelligent assistant that purports to be the “intelligent interface to everything.”

Last September after Kittlaus published a piece in TechCrunch (“A Cambrian Explosion in AI”), I wrote about how his view painted a picture of a near-term world where savvy intelligent assistants converse with us freely and know us well enough to anticipate our needs. In this future world, intelligent assistants carry out tasks and transactions for us, sometimes at our prompting and other times just based on predicting what we want.

Viv, as described by Kittlaus in the recent interview, embodies this next-generation product with predictive capabilities.

Viv will dramatically simplify the way we interact with smart objects connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) by acting as an intuitive conversational interface for these devices. He gives an example of a person driving in a car and talking to their intelligent assistant to have it send a specific birthday gift to a loved one. Based on a few simple statements from the driver, the assistant knows it needs to find the gift online, purchase the gift, have it shipped to the recipient’s home address, and even include a card with personalized greeting.

Kittlaus also reveals that Viv Labs will encourage external app development. Unlike with Siri, Google Now, and Cortana, Viv won’t be limited with only internal product development. Instead, he wants to add as much content as possible into what he calls Viv’s “global brain.” By interfacing with externally developed apps, Viv will be able to perform a wide range of functions applied across a broad knowledge base. Kittlaus says that Viv Labs is already working with automobile manufacturers, consumer electronics makers, and companies in the Internet space to provide apps for Viv.

Kittlaus also gives a glimpse into the intriguing technology underlying Viv, a patent called “A Cognitive Architecture and Marketplace for Dynamically Evolving Systems.” Viv is dynamically evolving because it has the ability to understand a user’s intent and instantaneously generate software algorithms that fulfill that intent. As Viv generates software programs on the fly, it continually updates its capabilities based on new content recently added to the global brain.

Viv Labs expects to launch their intelligent personal assistant sometime next year. It remains to be seen if Viv will mark the advent of the Cambrian explosion in AI that Kittlaus predicts, but expectations for the technology will undoubtedly be high.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles

Tags: Siri, intelligent assistant, Viv, Dag Kittlaus