Siri may have celebrated five years since its iPhone 4s debut this week, but Apple didn’t rush to acquire Viv, the follow-up AI assistant created by Siri’s makers.
Instead, Samsung snapped up Viv for an undisclosed amount.
Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, creators of the artificial intelligence technology that brought Siri to the iPhone, today showcased a new virtual assistant that’s even more amazing.
Viv, which has been secretly in development for the past four years, is a much more open platform that works closely with a whole bunch of different services to be even more powerful than its predecessor, and to take AI to a whole new level.
Siri has been gradually getting better since its debut in 2011, but some of its original creators are set to introduce its successor, Viv, next week — and, by all accounts, Siri better watch her back!
Having operated in stealth mode for more than a year, Viv’s arrival hopes to represent a significant step forward in artificial intelligence as AI assistants take on more of an active role in running our lives.
Apple’s next acquisition? It would be great to think so.
Siri wasn’t always baked into iOS. It started out as a standalone iPhone app that launched in the App Store almost three years ago. Three weeks after it went live to the public, Apple showed interest. Siri was bought by Apple a few weeks later for hundreds of millions of dollars. The personal assistant was then reborn in the iPhone 4S in October 2011.
Many don’t know the fascinating history behind Siri, like the fact that it started as a research project for the U.S. Defense Department, or that Steve Jobs personally spearheaded the acquisition. Apple is lucky it swept in when it did, because Siri was almost made a default app on Android.
Since the unveiling of its iPhone 4S back in October, Apple has received heaps of praise for one of its new features in particular: Siri. The digital assistant is by far the most impressive voice recognition service built into a mobile device, and it seems everyone has been blown away by it.
What many of you may not know, however, is that Siri is one of the few Apple products that wasn’t created by the team in Cupertino. Instead, Siri was created by Dag Kittlaus, a 34-year-old man from Norway, and it has made him a multimillionaire.
Siri co-founder Dag Kittlaus has reportedly left Apple just days after his sophisticated voice-recognition technology made its debut on the iPhone 4S. It was an ‘amicable’ departure, according to sources, that will allow Kittlaus to focus on “new entrepreneurial ideas.”
