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Dag Kittlaus, the creator of Apple’s Siri, has a new venture up his sleeves: Viv Labs, an artificial intelligence startup that is tasking itself with creating a program for answering any question and performing any task. Essentially, the Viv Labs product is a big step up from Siri (she often gets stumped with seemingly simple requests).
Though Viv Labs is based in San Jose, Kittlaus himself is a resident of Chicago and has said that the Chicago tech community has been heavily involved in the venture since it first started in stealth mode two years ago. Kittlaus told The Chicago Tribune that the GrubHub and Food Genius teams were essential in helping Viv Labs to run tests by granting Kittlaus’ team access to their application programming interfaces.
The Viv Labs team, which includes Siri co-founders Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham, will be working on stocking up tech talent in the Bay Area, while still drawing inspiration from Chicago-based creative talent.
The main goal for the team right now is to make Viv (the name of their product) ultra consumer-friendly, something not many can say about the Siri product. Viv will eventually make itself into a “global brain” by connecting with other apps and connected devices to access their artificial intelligence. How’s that for consumer-friendly, Siri?
Though Siri has definitely left a legacy, this female-voiced product is looking at some stiff competition not just from its successor Viv, but from artificial intelligence products acquired by and spawned from Mountain View tech giants like Google and even Facebook.
“Siri is chapter one of a much longer, bigger story,” Kittlaus told Wired.
