Artificial Intelligence : Viv vs Apple Siri vs Microsoft Cortana vs Google Now đ #AI #Viv #Siri #Cortana #GoogleNow Siriâs Inventors Are Building a Radical New AI That Does Anything You Ask đ WIRED - 2014/08/12 wired/2014/08/viv/ wired/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/ff_startup3_f.jpg Viv was named after the Latin root meaning live. Its San Jose, California, offices are decorated with tsotchkes bearing the numbers six and five (VI and V in roman numerals). When Apple announced the iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011, the headlines were not about its speedy A5 chip or improved camera. Instead they focused on an unusual new feature: an intelligent assistant, dubbed Siri. At first Siri, endowed with a female voice, seemed almost human in the way she understood what you said to her and responded, an advance in artificial intelligence that seemed to place us on a fast track to the Singularity. She was brilliant at fulfilling certain requests, like âCan you set the alarm for 6:30?â or âCall Dianeâs mobile phone.â And she had a personality: If you asked her if there was a God, she would demur with deft wisdom. âMy policy is the separation of spirit and silicon,â sheâd say. Over the next few months, however, Siriâs limitations became apparent. Ask her to book a plane trip and she would point to travel websitesâbut she wouldnât give flight options, let alone secure you a seat. Ask her to buy a copy of Lee Childâs new book and she would draw a blank, despite the fact that Apple sells it. Though Apple has since extended Siriâs powersâto make an OpenTable restaurant reservation, for exampleâshe still canât do something as simple as booking a table on the next available night in your schedule. She knows how to check your calendar and she knows how to use OpenÂTable. But putting those things together is, at the moment, beyond her. Now a small team of engineers at a stealth startup called Viv Labs claims to be on the verge of realizing an advanced form of AI that removes those limitations. Whereas Siri can only perform tasks that Apple engineers explicitly implement, this new program, they say, will be able to teach itself, giving it almost limitless capabilities. In time, they assert, their creation 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. âSiri is chapter one of a much longer, bigger story,â says Dag Kittlaus, one of Vivâs cofounders. He should know. Before working on Viv, he helped create Siri. So did his fellow cofounders, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham. For the past two years, the team has been working on Viv Labsâ productâalso named Viv, after the Latin root meaning live. Their project has been draped in secrecy, but the few outsiders who have gotten a look speak about it in rapturous terms. âThe vision is very significant,â says Oren Etzioni, a renowned AI expert who heads the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. âIf this team is successful, we are looking at the future of intelligent agents and a multibillion-dollar industry.â Viv is not the only company competing for a share of those billions. The field of artificial intelligence has become the scene of a frantic corporate arms race, with Internet giants snapping up AI startups and talent. Google recently paid a reported $500 million for the UK deep-learning company DeepMind and has lured AI legends Geoffrey Hinton and Ray Kurzweil to its headquarters in Mountain View, California. Facebook has its own deep-learning group, led by prize hire Yann LeCun from New York University. Their goal is to build a new generation of AI that can process massive troves of data to predict and fulfill our desires. 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. Vivâs creators hope that some day soon it will be embedded in a plethora of Internet-connected everyday objects. Viv founders say youâll access its artificial intelligence as a utility, the way you draw on electricity. Simply by speaking, you will connect to what they are calling âa global brain.â And that brain can help power a million different apps and devices. âIâm extremely proud of Siri and the impact itâs had on the world, but in many ways it could have been more,â Cheyer says. âNow 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.â Viv labs is tucked behind an unmarked door on a middle floor of a generic glass office building in downtown San Jose. Visitors enter into a small suite and walk past a pool table to get to the single conference room, glimpsing on the way a handful of engineers staring into monitors on trestle tables. Once in the meeting room, Kittlausâa product-whisperer whose career includes stints at Motorola and Appleâis usually the one to start things off. He acknowledges that an abundance of voice-navigated systems already exists. In addition to Siri, there is Google Now, which can anticipate some of your needs, alerting you, for example, that you should leave 15 minutes sooner for the airport because of traffic delays. Microsoft, which has been pursuing machine-learning techniques for decades, recently came out with a Siri-like system called Cortana. Amazon uses voice technology in its Fire TV product. But Kittlaus points out that all of these services are strictly limited. Cheyer elaborates: âGoogle Now has a huge knowledge graphâyou can ask questions like âWhere was Abraham Lincoln born?â And it can name the city. You can also say, âWhat is the population?â of a city and itâll bring up a chart and answer. But you cannot say, âWhat is the population of the city where Abraham Lincoln was born?ââ The system may have the data for both these components, but it has no ability to put them together, either to answer a query or to make a smart suggestion. Like Siri, it canât do anything that coders havenât explicitly programmed it to do. Viv breaks through those constraints by generating its own code on the fly, no programmers required. Take a complicated command like âGive me a flight to Dallas with a seat that Shaq could fit in.â Viv will parse the sentence and then it will perform its best trick: automatically generating a quick, efficient program to link third-party sources of information togetherâsay, Kayak, SeatGuru, and the NBA media guideâso it can identify available flights with lots of legroom. And it can do all of this in a fraction of a second. Viv is an open system that will let innumerable businesses and applications become part of its boundless brain. The technical barriers are minimal, requiring brief âtrainingâ (in some cases, minutes) for Viv to understand the jargon of the specific topic. As Vivâs knowledge grows, so will its understanding; its creators have designed it based on three principles they call its âpillarsâ: It will be taught by the world, it will know more than it is taught, and it will learn something every day. As with other AI products, that teaching involves using sophisticated algorithms to interpret the language and behavior of people using the systemâthe more people use it, the smarter it gets. By knowing who its users are and which services they interact with, Viv can sift through that vast trove of data and find new ways to connect and manipulate the information. Kittlaus says the end result will be a digital assistant who knows what you want before you ask for it. He envisions someone unsteadily holding a phone to his mouth outside a dive bar at 2 am and saying, âIâm drunk.â Without any elaboration, Viv would contact the userâs preferred car service, dispatch it to the address where heâs half passed out, and direct the driver to take him home. No further consciousness required. wired/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/ff_startup_f.jpg The founders of a stealth startup called Viv LabsâAdam Cheyer, Dag Kittlaus, and Chris Brighamâare building a Siri-like digital assistant that can process massive troves of data, teach itself, and write its own programs on the fly. The goal: to predict and fulfill our desires. If Kittlaus is in some ways the Steve Jobs of Vivâhe is the only non-engineer on the 10-person team and its main voice on strategy and marketingâCheyer is the companyâs Steve Wozniak, the projectâs key scientific mind. Unlike the whimsical creator of the Apple II, though, Cheyer is aggressively analytical in every facet of his life, even beyond the workbench. As a kid, he was a Rubikâs Cube champion, averaging 26 seconds a solution. When he encountered programming, he dove in headfirst. âI felt that computers were invented for me,â he says. And while in high school he discovered a regimen to force the world to bend to his will. âI live my life by what I call verbally stated goals,â he says. âI crystallize a feeling, a need, into words. I think about the words, and I tell everyone I meet, âThis is what Iâm doing.â I say it, and then I believe it. By telling people, youâre committed to it, and they help you. And it works. â He says he used the technique to land his early computing jobs, including the most significantâat SRI International, a Menlo Park think tank that invented the concept of computer windows and the mouse. It was there, in the early 2000s, that Cheyer led the engineering of a Darpa-backed AI effort to build âa humanlike system that could sense the world, understand it, reason about it, plan, communicate, and act.â The SRI-led team built what it called a Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes, or CALO. They set some AI high-water marks, not least being the systemâs ability to understand natural language. As the five-year program wound down, it was unclear what would happen next. That was when Kittlaus, who had quit his job at Motorola, showed up at SRI as an entrepreneur in residence. When he saw a CALO-related prototype, he told Cheyer he could definitely build a business from it, calling it the perfect complement to the just-released iPhone. In 2007, with SRIâs blessing, they licensed the technology for a startup, taking on a third cofounder, an AI expert named Tom Gruber, and eventually renaming the system Siri. The small team, which grew to include Chris Brigham, an engineer who had impressed Cheyer on CALO, moved to San Jose and worked for two years to get things right. âOne of the hardest parts was the natural language understanding,â Cheyer says. Ultimately they had an iPhone app that could perform a host of interesting tasksâcall a cab, book a table, get movie ticketsâand carry on a conversation with brio. They released it publicly to users in February 2010. Three weeks later, Steve Jobs called. He wanted to buy the company. âI was shocked at how well he knew our app,â Cheyer says. At first they declined to sell, but Jobs persisted. His winning argument was that Apple could expose Siri to a far wider audience than a startup could reach. He promised to promote it as a key element on every iPhone. Apple bought the company in April 2010 for a reported $200 million. The core Siri team came to Apple with the project. But as Siri was honed into a product that millions could use in multiple languages, some members of the original team reportedly had difficulties with executives who were less respectful of their vision than Jobs was. KittÂlaus left Apple the day after the launchâthe day Steve Jobs died. Cheyer departed several months later. âI do feel if Steve were alive, I would still be at Apple,â Cheyer says. âIâll leave it at that.â (Gruber, the third Siri cofounder, remains at Apple.) After several months, Kittlaus got back in touch with Cheyer and Brigham. They asked one another what they thought the world would be like in five years. As they drew ideas on a whiteboard in Kittlausâ house, Brigham brought up the idea of a program that could put the things it knows together in new ways. As talks continued, they lit on the concept of a cloud-based intelligence, a global brain. âThe only way to make this ubiquitous conversational assistant is to open it up to third parties to allow everyone to plug into it,â Brigham says. In retrospect, they were re-creating Siri as it might have evolved had Apple never bought it. Before the sale, Siri had partnered with around 45 services, from AllMenus to Yahoo; Apple had rolled Siri out with less than half a dozen. âSiri in 2014 is less capable than it was in 2010,â says Gary Morgenthaler, one of the funders of the original app. Cheyer and Brigham tapped experts in various AI and coding niches to fill out their small group. To produce some of the toughest partsâthe architecture to allow Viv to understand language and write its own programsâthey brought in Mark Gabel from the University of Texas at Dallas. Another key hire was David Gondek, one of the creators of IBMâS Watson. Funding came from Solina Chau, the partner (in business and otherwise) of the richest man in China, Li Ka-shing. Chau runs the venture firm Horizons Ventures. In addition to investing in Facebook, DeepMind, and Summly (bought by Yahoo), it helped fund the original Siri. When Vivâs founders asked Chau for $10 million, she said, âIâm in. Do you want me to wire it now?â Itâs early May, and Kittlaus is addressing the team at its weekly engineering meeting. âYou can see the progress,â he tells the group, âsee it get closer to the point where it just works.â Each engineer delineates the advances theyâve made and next steps. One explains how he has been refining Vivâs response to âGet me a ticket to the cheapest flight from SFO to Charles de Gaulle on July 2, with a return flight the following Monday.â In the past week, the engineer added an airplane-seating database. Using a laptop-based prototype of Viv that displays a virtual phone screen, he speaks into the microphone. Lufthansa Flight 455 fits the bill. âSeat 61G is available according to your preferences,â Viv replies, then purchases the seat using a credit card. Vivâs founders donât 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 Vivâs AI, just as PC manufacturers once clamored to boast of their Intel microprocessors. They envision its icon joining the pantheon of familiar symbols like Power On, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. âIntelligence becomes a utility,â Kittlaus says. âBoy, wouldnât it be nice if you could talk to everything, and it knew you, and it knew everything about you, and it could do everything?â That would also be nice because it just might provide Viv with a business model. Kittlaus thinks Viv could be instrumental in what he calls âthe referral economy.â He cites a factoid about Match that he learned from its CEO: The company arranges 50,000 dates a day. âWhat Match isnât able to do is say, âLet me get you tickets for something. Would you like me to book a table? Do you want me to send Uber to pick her up? Do you want me to have flowers sent to the table?ââ Viv could provide all those servicesâin exchange for a cut of the transactions that resulted. Building that ecosystem will be a difficult task, one that Viv Labs could hasten considerably by selling out to one of the Internet giants. âLet me just cut through all the usual founder bullshit,â Kittlaus says. âWhat weâre really after is ubiquity. We want this to be everywhere, and weâre going to consider all paths along those lines.â To some associated with Viv Labs, selling the company would seem like a tired rerun. âIâm deeply hoping they build it,â says Bart Swanson, a Horizons adviser on Viv Labsâ board. âThey will be able to control it only if they do it themselves.â Whether they will succeed, of course, is not certain. âViv is potentially very big, but itâs all still potential,â says Morgenthaler, the original Siri funder. A big challenge, he says, will be whether the thousands of third-party components work togetherâor whether they clash, leading to a confused Viv that makes boneheaded errors. Can Viv get it right? âThe jury is out, but I have very high confidence,â he says. âI only have doubt as to when and how.â Most of the carefully chosen outsiders who have seen early demos are similarly confident. One is Vishal Sharma, who until recently was VP of product for Google Now. When Cheyer showed him how Viv located the closest bottle of wine that paired well with a dish, he was blown away. âI donât know any system in the world that could answer a question like that,â he says. âMany things can go wrong, but I would like to see something like this exist.â Indeed, many things have to go right for Viv to make good on its foundersâ promises. It has to prove that its code-making skills can scale to include petabytes of data. It has to continually get smarter through omnivorous learning. It has to win users despite not having a preexisting base like Google and Apple have. It has to lure developers who are already stressed adapting their wares to multiple platforms. And 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. wired/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/ff_startup4_f.jpg
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 19:39:50 +0000
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