Siri Founders at Viv Confident About their Deep Learning AI

October 3, 2014

A new deep-learning startup whose aim is to eclipse Apple’s Siri was founded by some of the people who built Siri in the first place. We learn about Viv Labs in Wired’s article, “Siri’s Inventors Are Building a Radical New AI that Does Anything You Ask.” Viv (Latin for “live”) is working to surpass Siri’s limits, to create an AI that can “teach itself” about the unique preferences and needs of each user instead of relying on programmers’ educated guesses about what consumers will want It is the much-hypothesized virtual assistant that “knows what you want before you do.” Writer Steven Levy elaborates:

“Viv strives to be the first consumer-friendly assistant that truly achieves that promise. It wants to be not only blindingly smart and infinitely flexible but omnipresent. Viv’s creators hope that some day soon it will be embedded in a plethora of Internet-connected everyday objects. Viv founders say you’ll access its artificial intelligence 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.”

This goal, though unsettling to some, is far from unique; several big-name, talent-filled companies are racing toward it, like Google, Facebook, and, of course, Apple itself. Will this team’s experience with Siri give Viv Labs the advantage? Not even the company’s founders are sure when Viv will make it to market, though they are confident that it will leave Siri in the dust.

The article includes a flowchart that well illustrates the relationship between the example input, “on the way to my brother’s house, I need to pick up some cheap wine that goes well with lasagna” and the resulting “list of wine stores with suitable bottles along the way to brother’s house” to be produced in 1/20 of a second. It also includes more on the creation of Siri, Viv’s approach, and the deep learning market in general. Though we don’t yet know which company will secure the lead in this field, we can see that self-teaching AIs are poised to forever change the way many of us relate to the world.

Cynthia Murrell, October 03, 2014

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

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One Response to “Siri Founders at Viv Confident About their Deep Learning AI”

  1. Siri With iPhone Developers As Your Assistant | AnjumsList on October 3rd, 2014 2:30 am

    […] Siri Founders at Viv Confident About their Deep Learning AI … […]

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