Apple's Beats brand in April unveiled the Powerbeats Pro, a redesigned wire-free version of its popular fitness-oriented Powerbeats earbuds.
Siri Creators Debuting New AI Assistant 'Viv' Next Week
Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, co-founders of Siri, the virtual assistant now built into all of Apple's iOS devices, are set to demonstrate their newest artificial intelligence project on Monday, reports The Washington Post. Viv, the name of the AI bot, is more advanced than Siri and is able to carry out complex tasks by mimicking the "spontaneity and knowledge base" of a human assistant.
Viv can, for example, set up a dinner reservation and purchase movie tickets all based on one query, parsing ticket prices to find deals and offering suggestions if a movie is sold out or a restaurant has no seating available. Completing the same task with Siri would require multiple commands and human interaction. In an example given by The Washington Post, the Viv team uses it to order pizzas from a nearby restaurant, with Viv parsing numerous voice-based topping and side dish orders without ever needing to open an app.
Image via The Washington Post
Much of Viv's functionality is enabled through integration with third-party apps like Uber, Florist One, SeatGuru, ZocDoc, and Grubhub, similar to Amazon's Alexa. The team behind Viv is in talks to bring on more partners and plans bring the Viv technology to a variety of Internet-connected devices like cars and TVs.
Siri was built around the same premise, but underwent changes under Apple's leadership. "Steve [Jobs] had some ideas about the first version, and it wasn't necessarily aligned with all the things that we were doing," Kittlaus told The Washington Post.
Google and Facebook have already made offers to purchase Viv, but it is not clear if Kittlaus and Cheyer have plans to sell the technology. The Viv Labs team wants to see the technology built into a wide range of devices, and Kittlaus says the company will "pick the path that gets us there."
Viv can, for example, set up a dinner reservation and purchase movie tickets all based on one query, parsing ticket prices to find deals and offering suggestions if a movie is sold out or a restaurant has no seating available. Completing the same task with Siri would require multiple commands and human interaction. In an example given by The Washington Post, the Viv team uses it to order pizzas from a nearby restaurant, with Viv parsing numerous voice-based topping and side dish orders without ever needing to open an app.
Much of Viv's functionality is enabled through integration with third-party apps like Uber, Florist One, SeatGuru, ZocDoc, and Grubhub, similar to Amazon's Alexa. The team behind Viv is in talks to bring on more partners and plans bring the Viv technology to a variety of Internet-connected devices like cars and TVs.
Grubhub chief executive Matt Maloney said he rushed to sign up with Viv two years ago, impressed with the idea of allowing consumers to perform different activities without having to toggle between services. "No one has been able to say, 'I want the movie ticket, and the bottle of wine, and some flowers on the side' -- all in one breath," he said.The goal with Viv, according to Kittlaus, is to offer a way for humans to interact naturally with services through complex human-to-human style conversations, a project Kittlaus and Cheyer have been pursuing since before the development of Siri.
Siri was built around the same premise, but underwent changes under Apple's leadership. "Steve [Jobs] had some ideas about the first version, and it wasn't necessarily aligned with all the things that we were doing," Kittlaus told The Washington Post.
Google and Facebook have already made offers to purchase Viv, but it is not clear if Kittlaus and Cheyer have plans to sell the technology. The Viv Labs team wants to see the technology built into a wide range of devices, and Kittlaus says the company will "pick the path that gets us there."
Tags: Siri Guide, Viv
[ 154 comments ]
Top Rated Comments
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43 months ago
Viv, tell Siri to show me movie listings.
Siri: I'm sorry, I didn't get that.
Viv: movie
Siri: sorry, I am unable to move
Viv: never mind
Siri: the nearest mine is 5038 kilometers from your current location.
43 months ago
Hey guys... We got Apple to buy us once. Now that Apple isn't spending any money on Siri, let's split off and invent another AI, make it a bit smarter, and then sell it back to Apple again and make a crapton more money!
43 months ago
If they want a company to work with they should stay away from Apple. Too many internal politics and it will get shoved in the conner somewhere and never see the light of day.
So sad, yet so true. :apple:
[doublepost=1462404293][/doublepost]
Sells to highest bidder in 3, 2, 1...
These guys will stay away from Apple like the plague. They left Apple soon after the acquisition of Siri. You wonder why Siri has stayed so underwhelming? Because these guys left to work on furthering their ideas in an innovative setting. Sure as hell is not Cupertino. :apple:
43 months ago
If they want a company to work with they should stay away from Apple. Too many internal politics and it will get shoved in the conner somewhere and never see the light of day.
Completely agree. Sure the pay check is nice but really has siri improved at all since 2011. It seriously needs the internet to set a timer....
43 months ago
If they want a company to work with they should stay away from Apple. Too many internal politics and it will get shoved in the conner somewhere and never see the light of day.
43 months ago
Viv like vivid, the opposite of Siri...
My take is the name comes from Antonio Vivaldi, a baroque composer who was known for his complex and compounded works. It is appropriate.
43 months ago
Voice recognition using a relational database with multiple associative weighed vendors creating a single response based on compounded queries. Not bad work boys!
43 months ago
Just anorher strategy to sell a "new" product. The viv-boys are just doing their job: Spelling ill of a sold predecessor is part of profit maximation. It's that simple. I found really unsexy haters of Siri here, maybe related to that campain.
Personally, I think Siri does her job quite well. I do not know one single person here in the real world around me, that hates Siri.
We are living in a competive world. But spitting across the street is beyond cultivated colloquial. It's that easy.
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