If you are into animated movies and haven’t watched Big Hero 6, I suggest you get your hands on it. It’s packed with laughter and a great story about the birth of a hero. But that’s not what this article is about. The technology and imagination packed into that movie is what struck me the most (led me to take some notes too).
After taking a course in Machine Learning and Natural Language processing(NLP), Artificial Intelligence has become my obsession that will probably last for the rest of my life. My interests are around designing the world’s consumer data and in my research around the idea, I came across Viv. It’s an interesting and cool company founded by the former founders of Siri. Their approach to AI and data organisation is really exciting and quite frankly, really brilliant. The personal assistants we have today, Siri, Cortana and Google Now all are supreme personal assistants. But they are only the beginning of what a true personal assistant really can and should do. The founders of Viv understand that and hence are working on an advanced version of what they achieved with Siri. Someone could say the personal assistants we have today are magical and that’s absolutely true but let’s explore what a personal assistant truly is from first principles.
A true personal assistant in an office or home environment has the following capabilities:
- Schedule appointments in your calendar that don’t interfere with your gym schedule or soccer event. She can actually schedule dinner when your favourite show is not playing the same night.
- She can book you a flight with a seat that has the best leg room for your height.
- She can remind you to buy milk when you are by the mall without you telling her to explicitly to remind you there but because that’s the perfect place to actually grab milk and the cheapest shop is there too
That’s just a few things but that’s essentially how personal assistants need to work. Those tasks a enormously difficult when you break them down and inorder to get those tasks correct, the assistant needs to know a tonne about you and the world. Fortunately we have crossed the boundary where a lot of the data needed is already available. Location data on Foursquare, Images of the world from Instagram etc. And that’s where Viv comes in. The are building what they characterise as the “Global Brain.”
“A platform that enables developers to plug into and create an intelligent conversational interface to anything.”
To explain it without writing a book, here’s a diagram of the concept:
I think what they are working on will fundamentally change how we interface with applications, data, and information we have gathered since the dawn of the cloud and internet. And it’s just the beginning of many more things will come as a result of their work. It’s definitely the world where Baymax (the robotic character from Big Hero 6) needed to cross the line from being a medical assistant to an everything assistant. Good thing he could learn anything and even more awesome is that Viv’s founders are building the tech with the ability to learn. So if there is something that’s not known or missing in Viv’s tech, you can always teach. And that’s simply one of the coolest things I am looking forward to in the future…
This story was adopted from Wired and I wrote about it on my new website.
