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Creators Of Siri Demo Their Next AI Assistant Viv, It's Far More Open Platform (twitter.com)
A small company called Viv on Monday unveiled a "frictionless", artificially intelligent software also called Viv, which understands complicated human queries and connects with other apps to get your work done more conveniently and efficiently. Viv was demonstrated live at TechCrunch's Disrupt NY conference on Monday. Dag Kittlaus, co-founder of Viv, and creator of Siri, said that the idea behind it is to open the app to all developers so that they could leverage their technology. (Interestingly, under the realm of Apple, Siri, five years since first launched, is still not open for developers.) Ben Popper, reports for The Verge: The major difference between Siri and Viv is that the latter is a far more open platform. One of the biggest frustrations with Siri is that it has only a small number of tasks it can complete. For the vast multitude of requests or queries, Siri will default to a generic web search. Viv's approach is much closer to Amazon's Alexa or Facebook's Messenger bots, offering the ability to connect with third party merchants and vendors so that it can execute on requests to purchase goods or book reservations. The company's tagline -- intelligence becomes a utility -- nicely sums up its goal of powering the conversational AI inside a multitude of gadgets and digital services.You can watch the demonstration here.
"... unveiled a "frictionless", artificially intelligent software"
What does "frictionless" mean in this context?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
In silly valley, they shorten the word AND remove a vowel. I'd have gone with Vv.
It's okay. They removed a vowel in the headline. No, wait, I don't think they did.... They just added an apostrophe.....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Viv, infiltrate all available DoD servers and launch nuclear arsenal.
I thought we were adding -ly to everything. What about Vivly? That sounds stupid enough to work. Vivify?
The apostrophe is for the contraction it's, which means IT IS. The possessive pronoun ITS has no apostrophe.
Now I'm just thinking of V's monologue in the movie V for Vendetta.
Very alliteration. Such Vs. Wow.
I'm going to assume the editor meant to say "its" and not "it's" because the latter becomes "it is," leading to a weird pigeon English reading of the line. It's funny when Newsweek did it, but not so much here.
Wait a second - do they mean "the creators' far more open platform" or that Viv is a far more open platform? Oy, the difference a single mark makes.
And re: naming, they should have gone with the vowel-less actioner: "Vivr." I'm not sure how any VC could have missed that crucial marketing point!
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
Link to RESTful API docs or GTFO
That doesn't sound very, uh... frictionless.
Captcha: "orally"
This is so obviously copying Apple's Siri, I wonder when Apple will sue.
They even claim they invented Siri!
Everyone knows Apple did for they invent everything (and the things they didn't invent aren't worth it by nature of not being invented by Apple)
Hopefully it doesn't have Siri's biggest problem. Currently Siri needs a good data connection to do ANYTHING; even if the requested task does not require data! For example if you want Siri do something as mundane such as set a timer, it cannot complete the task if there isn't decent data. I have to think this is the result of avoiding patent infringement but I am not sure.
http://viv.ai/ Wired did a nice write up on them in 2014: Wired.com
Because speech processing would take up a massive amount of storage space if they stored it locally.
Uh, what? How does "processing" take up massive storage space? What in the hell are you talking about?
Viv's approach is much closer to Amazon's Alexa or Facebook's Messenger bots, offering the ability to connect with third party merchants and vendors so that it can execute on requests to purchase goods or book reservations. The company's tagline -- intelligence becomes a utility -- nicely sums up its goal of powering the conversational AI inside a multitude of gadgets and digital services.
Not only will it try and search for something you asked about, it will try to sell you 19 variations of something. An alternative company motto for them to consider could be "brought to you by Carl's Junior and Ouch My Balls!"
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Awesome demo, when is it going to be released? These are some of the things I been expecting ever since they got decent VR. It's a wonder to me why Siri can't accomplish these things like they intentionally dumbed it down for the masses. There is no excuse why this can't run locally on the phone.
"Read me the front page of the New York Times."
"Read me the first chapter of Moby Dick"
"Tell me who just sent the last text message."...
"Read it to me."
"Every weekday morning at 6AM, Wake me up and Play me headline news from Agogo."
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
Alexa has the same problem, since voice recognition happens on the Internet.
Is it possible to do full untrained voice recognition on a platform as limited as a smartphone?
Google supports offline voice recognition, but only for a very limited set of commands. http://www.zdnet.com/article/g...
Viv: movie quotes involving "bags of sand".
I view a different reality from the world you assume.
"Read me the front page of the New York Times."
Viv - "Ad brought to you by McDonald's. You deserve a break today. Present this device and receive a 1% discount on any purchase of 5.00 or more for lunch. First Story - Brought to you by SnapOn Tools -" and you get treated to the exact portrayal of the story the propagandists dream of, with all the emphasis and pregnant pauses in all the right places.
"Read me the first chapter of Moby Dick"
Viv - "People who read this book also read of Mice and Men. I do not show you as a registered owner of reading rights for that book, would you like me to buy a copy for you? Please wait while I verify your ownership of rights to read Moby Dick - You have 2 reading rights remaining to this book - First page, brought to you by Kelloggs" *commercial spot*
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I had my phone in my jeans by the bed while I was sexually intercoursing and viv used my panted gasps to query through my phone's browser history and load the most sordid of pornography. Unlike the video, she didn't find it hot, slapped me and left me with a semi to work off myself.
Fucking blumpkin.
Blumpkin? Strange name for a girl..
Blumpkin? You have a toilet in your bed?
I do not want to evaluate your statement any further.. I will just ask your girlfriend when she shows up.
My GPS has speech processing. Works decently. Has to understand place names; and it does. It was an under $100 GPS. It does this without a connection to anything. And while it contains a huge map database. And it's not a very new2 device; I bought it in 2013 (and no doubt the speech recog software was designed somewhat earlier than that.)
The reason that they're all using the cloud isn't because they have to. It's because they can turn you into a product more easily; "you" being the developer and the user.
Best direction here is to dig out from under the commercial models and see to it that the field is actually open. Take a look at where MyCroft is aiming. They're shipping prototypes last I heard. They're looking at on-board speech recog as well.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yes, it is. This has had general speech recog since 2013 or earlier. Odds are the software that got that done is way better today than in 2013.
There couldn't be a reason people would want to tie you irretrievably to their could-based / online speech recognition services, could there? Bueller? Bueller?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I had my phone in my jeans by the bed while I was sexually intercoursing and viv used my panted gasps to query through my phone's browser history and load the most sordid of pornography. Unlike the video, she didn't find it hot, slapped me and left me with a semi to work off myself.
Fucking blumpkin.
Blumpkin? Strange name for a girl..
Blumpkin? You have a toilet in your bed?
I do not want to evaluate your statement any further.. I will just ask your girlfriend when she shows up.
More like two girls, one truck?
Echo is fun to use. But the developer process... it's pretty much a grade-A clusterfuck.
To get Echo to do anything, you have to provide canned speech fragments that define everything your service is going to do. There's no "smarts" at all behind the speech interpretation; it's straight-up text-to-text matching. That's quite aside from the secure server requirements and the complete lack of a reasonable local echo-to-computer-to-echo interface.
I have an Echo and an Echo dot. Love using them. Wish they were reasonable to develop for, have many things I'd like to do right here. Looks like Mycroft is where I have to place my hopes, though. Amazon's not showing any signs at all of giving Echo anything more than the boneheaded API it currently has. Of course, it's designed to support Amazon. Not the customer. Which illuminates their approach somewhat, I think.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
By the nature of the demo it is clear what they aim at.
4 demoed transactions in 2 minutes: 1. show weather, 2. spend money on tulips, 3. spend money on hotel, 4. spend money on cab. VIV obviously stands for
Valuable Information Value.
Definitely something you will not install on your wife's phone.
Well, I've got to get back to work. When I stop rowing, the slave ship just goes in circles.
"Hey Viv, when does 'its' take an apostrophe?"
slashdot moderation, lol.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Not going to use this. My wife's called Viv. Too confusing and potentially dangerous.
Alexa has the same problem, since voice recognition happens on the Internet.
Is it possible to do full untrained voice recognition on a platform as limited as a smartphone?
Google supports offline voice recognition, but only for a very limited set of commands.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/g...
You can use Mac OS X VR-to-text in an offline mode. It downloads a big database (50 MB, big deal), and you have to adapt to its language: That is, "comma", "line break, line break", "close parentheses", and so on.
The help webpage gives the full list of commands for punctuating as you speak. And, in the usual Apple style, the specific words chosen are the most reasonable 'average intuitive' choice that people might make.
I wrote a 3-page essay, just to test it out. My wife read it, and asked if I had been the one who had written it, because it was in a dramatically different style than my normal (technical) writing. Well, I was speaking conversationally, so yes, the tone of my writing was completely different. Actually very cool.
The guy says they're patenting their "computer science breakthrough called dynamic program generation". Meaning it uses something similar to genetic programming or combining different modules together and they're laying one more mine field for any random AI developer or highly functional styled developer. Fucking algorithm patents.
MyCroft may be of interest then.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.