“Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer created the artificial intelligence behind Siri, Apple’s iconic digital assistant, and one of the first modern apps to capably handle natural language queries on a smartphone,” Ben Popper reports for The Verge.
“Today the pair showed off their newest creation, Viv, a next generation AI assistant that they have been developing in stealth mode for the last four years,” Popper reports. “The goal was to create a better version of Siri, one that connected to a multitude of services, instead of routinely shuffling queries off to a basic web search. During a 20-minute demo onstage at Disrupt NYC, Viv flawlessly handled a dozen complex requests, not just in terms of comprehension, but by connecting with third-party merchants to purchase goods and book reservations.”
Popper reports, “Viv responded to things like: ‘Was it raining in Seattle three Thursdays ago?’ and ‘Will it be warmer than 70 degrees near the Golden Gate Bridge after 5PM the day after tomorrow?’ But she could also handle more social queries like: ‘Send Adam 20 bucks” and “Send my mom some flowers.'”
The team behind Siri debuts its next-gen AI “Viv” at #TCDisrupt https://t.co/m3Kf6OrtXc
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) May 9, 2016
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Wow, natural language comprehension is really getting good!
Speech recognition is getting scary good. Star Trek computer speech recognition might be sooner than we think!
Keep in mind that the speech recognition part of Siri, and presumably Viv, is handled by software from Nuance. It’s not actually part of the ‘AI’.
You speak, Nuance translates that to text, the text is picked up by Siri, Viv, whatever, then run through its Expert System, response data is returned, that’s translated by Nuance back into speech.
IOW: Two systems are required. Speech-to-text, Text-to-speech is a separate system.
Siri sucks, it has always sucked, and it sucks more now.
I suspect the same from Viv.
Just the facts, not trolling. If I had an entirely different experience with Siri, not to mention a lot of Apple crap lately, I would praise. I am very grumpy that Tim Cook’s Apple has mucked up so much.
A sure sign of a troll – stating “Just the facts”.
One major fact you left out, “For ME, in my INDIVIDUAL experience, with MY phone…”
Hang on if what you claim is true it’s Steve Jobs Apple that mucked up so much. Which simply shows if you aren’t a troll you are a tosser.
Gulp it down, here, let me help.
Siri works fine for me.
Wonder what the problem is with you?
Of course, you didn’t give anything to back up your opinion – just a generic ‘it sucks’. Very insightful. Definitely sounds like a troll comment to me.
jß, is your real name Barry Kripke?
The speech recognition is nice but the on the fly ability to “create code” and carry out complex tasks by just asking it to is the best part. Why on earth Apple couldn’t find a way to keep these guys on the Siri team and have this in the works is just beyond my comprehension.
TOTAL agreement. Something wonky went on after Siri was joined with Apple. To quote one article:
Only one of Siri’s three co-founders, Tom Gruber, remains at the company. Kittlaus left three weeks after Apple re-launched Siri in 2011, and Cheyer quit a year later.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/siri-do-engine-apple-iphone_n_2499165.html
Ideally, Apple should have had the Siri team continue their R&D, in which case Viv would have been designed inside Apple. My impression is that when Apple started disabling and sterilizing aspects of Siri, the Siri team got miffed.
It is baffling..
So why aren’t these guys working at apple? Siri’s development has moved at a snails pace.
This is the main weakness I see in Cook. He’s a supply chain genius and businessmen and a maintainer. But he’s not a product visionary or innovator or market disrupter. Apple now has these little pieces of technology that have begun to drag & eventually will fall behind–they need a vision person to PUSH THEM HARD into the future–not just protect the Apple nest egg.
It is getting very difficult (painful even) to watch Apple mature under Cook’s passive leadership. Don’t get me wrong, I like him and he does well at what he’s good at–but he is not a product person or product driver.
Actually it was Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall who crippled Siri. When Siri was stand alone app it could do a lot of the things Viv is doing now.
Saw the title, thought of this:
Please don’t hit me!
Meanwhile, Microsoft is hard at work developing an improved racist and culturally insensitive AI bot using 2nd generation insult algorithms.
Nice demo but everything works in a demo. There us no way to know if these queries were unrehearsed and sent directly to their processing engine.. Or not.
I’d love to pass off some of this stuff to a machine, but I am skeptical of one demo. Also this particular snippet did not mention the sdk or the target platform.
I’ve worked on a lot of demos and the golden rule is that you always rehearse every aspect of a demo to make it run as smoothly as possible. Steve Jobs was a great advocate for meticulously rehearsing demos.
There is no way that these particular queries would not have been tried many times beforehand.
In the late 80’s I used to run demos of an innovative digital audio system and I designed my demo so that there was a huge obvious flaw in it. I would demo how a mute video of somebody playing a few notes on piano could be easily dubbed with piano samples from a different piano and then played back in perfect sync. When played back, it appeared to be a proper sync recording but there was inevitably some smart Alec in the audience who would point out that the piano seen in the video was a crappy upright piano, while my samples were from a concert Bosendorfer grand piano and sounded far too good.
I would initially look crestfallen, but then say “No problem” and simply press a button to substitute a different set of samples, which would use the previously created timing event triggers. Within a couple of seconds, I was replaying exactly the same video but now with samples from an upright piano and perfectly in sync. By engineering a spontaneous, but apparently unexpected response from a well known and respected member of the audience, instantly resolving the problem that he pointed out made it a very convincing demo – even though I had rehearsed it many times before.
Hound can do a lot of that. It’s sad that Siri hasn’t really grown much, really. It’s gotten older, but hasn’t matured. I still hate dictating, and those who dictate write like children as a result of it.