Siri co-founder and former CEO Dag Kittlaus said in an interview with US financial media CNBC on Tuesday that under the management of Apple, Siri may not play out. Siri may not be living out its full potential under Apple’s wing, but voice-enabled assistants are nevertheless the future of digital technology.
Kittlaus said that since Apple acquired Siri in 2010, ‘on the positive side, it’s a lot faster, the speech recognition’s gotten a lot better, but they dropped the ball on a couple things like opening it up to third parties.’ Kittlaus is currently co-founder and CEO of Viv, an artificial intelligence company acquired by Samsung in 2016.
Kittlaus also said that generally, voice assistants today are used in ‘very basic’ ways. Most consumers only use it to set alarms and reminders, but their potential is actually very large. He recalls that in 2007, the iPhone was just released, there were only nine apps, like weather and Stocks. But after 9 months, they opened the App Store. There are now millions. Applications have changed the world. So we also hope that artificial intelligence and voice assistants can achieve this effect.
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This week, Kittlaus’ team at Viv launched a new platform that allows third-party companies to develop features for Samsung’s own Bixby voice assistant. He said the tools and the ‘third parties come in almost like a Wikipedia-like way. So anyone can add new content to Bixby. Users can empower it.’
Eventually, you’ve got thousands of things that these things can do for you,’ he continued. ‘It becomes one of the most important parts of your day.’ Consumers can quickly manipulate connected cars via voice and in this way complete daily tasks such as takeaways and gifts. Kittlaus said voice input is about seven times faster than typing. ‘This will definitely happen,’ he said. ‘Once you start using it, you don’t want to go back to the old way anymore, right?’
