The Co-Founder & former CEO of Siri, Dag Kittlaus, says that he “would have liked to see Siri evolve to doing more things, greater capabilities to become a bigger part of your life.” Siri was acquired by Apple in 2010.
In 2012 Kittlaus co-founded another AI company, Viv, an artificial intelligence platform that enables developers to create an intelligent, conversational interface to anything. Viv was acquired by Samsung in 2016.
Dag Kittlaus, Co-Founder of Siri and Viv, recently discussed Siri and Viv on Bloomberg:
Has Siri lived up to your expectations?
On the positive side, it’s gotten a lot faster, the speech recognition got a lot better. I would have liked to see Siri evolve to doing more things, greater capabilities to become a bigger part of your life merely because it’s doing so many more things for you.
That was really the idea for the next company that we started, was how do we make it go from, not a novelty, but from a basic utility in your life to something much bigger, a paradigm in itself that you are really relying on in your everyday world.
Why Hasn’t Apple Gotten There and is it Apples Fault?
To some extent, but I just think they had a different focus from where we started it originally. I would have liked to see Apple open up to a third party ecosystem much earlier. That’s something that we are doing now. We think that is the big missing piece.
The Apple app store is actually a perfect metaphor for this. The iPhone actually launched in 2007 with just a few Apple apps on it, weather and some very basic things. When the app store opened and unleashed the creativity of the developers around the world that changed the world.
About Viv from the Original Announcement:
For consumers, Viv is going to be the intelligent interface to everything you’re going to be talking to all different kinds of things it’s going to be doing all sorts of things for you. For developers, Viv is going to be the next great marketplace. You’ve got app stores today but the thing that comes after app stores is this new type of marketplace. This is a marketplace that works for all the different kinds of devices that the Internet of Things will in use cases that they’ll generate and a marketplace that will become the next big area.