Siri Co-Founder Says Steve Jobs Was 'Relentless'

in 2010 dad kit loss received a phone call from Steve Jobs he was proposing a deal to buy the first true automated virtual personal assistant that kit loss says he had built for two hundred million dollars that was Siri kit loss agreed to Jobs's proposal Siri became the launch pad for an onslaught of voice assistant technology today between KITT losses Siri Alexa Google assistant over fifty percent of US households use intelligent assistant and Kaos didn't stop with Apple he is continuing to lead the voice revolution as CEO and co-founder of viv labs the AI company behind Samsung's big speak which just opened to third-party developers i sat down with KITT lots to talk about Steve Jobs and the future of voice technology take a listen it started out with a phone call he literally called me out of the blue and said we love what you're doing and could you come over to my house tomorrow I loved in talked about it with you did you fall out of your chair or a little bit it's not the normal startup routine two weeks after you launch your first app on the App Store to have Steve Jobs call you and invite you over to his house but yeah we were we were flattered but we're very interested to see what they wanted anyway we went you met with him yep what happened so we had a but like a three-hour discussion in front of his fireplace we were putting our feet up there and chatting about the future so he he was convincing us that they were gonna win the smartphone worse and that if we threw we call it throwing in together that we could really build a new way to interact with devices especially the iPhone now at the time a number of different companies were trying to buy Siri correct yeah we had offers previously but we weren't really ready to sell so it was you know when Steve calls and you know every technologist wants to take their what they're working their baby and go big with it so that was a pretty hard I think you refused but we did decide you know it was a long process so you know he called me like 37 days in a row he was calling me at midnight and yeah so he was very involved and engaged in getting Syria to be a part of Apple so that's what you mean when you say relentless yes you did a deal with him and then you went on to develop with him what was that like yeah he was very very active in this so he we met every week and went through you know what do we want Syria to do you know for the first instantiation and Apple but he you know it was fun to work with us somebody like him a so detail-oriented that had a very strong opinion about what it should do and we had a lot of good debates about it was his vision and how did it jive with your vision well he wanted the first thing he wanted to do that was different from what we were already doing was to make it really revolve around all the basic everyday use cases you know calling and messaging and reminders and some of the things that we saw from the first version of Siri we also agreed that eventually we wanted to get into a lot more things like conversational commerce so the ability to buy book reserve things and you know take things that were previously much harder to do with your phone and because you can just use your voice to do it make it much easier there's a funny story about Steve saying to Syria are you a man or a woman what's your what's your answer to the question of Syria's gender series actually genderless even though the name Syrian Norwegian means beautiful woman that leads you to victory we didn't we decided deliberately not to make it one gender or another and rather to have it be sort of a persona that's there to help you so and you're right you can choose male voices as well as the default Syria was first integrated into the iPhone 4s now it's more up to the iPhone 10s has it lived up to your expectations well so on the positive side it's gotten a lot faster their speech recognition got a lot better I would have liked to see Siri evolve to do to doing more things so have 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 genesis for the idea for the next company that we started was how do we make it go from you know a not a novelty but a basic sort of utility in your life to something much bigger a paradigm in itself but that's you know you're really relying on and use in your everyday world so why do you think Syria hasn't gotten there is it Apple's fault to some extent but I think they just had a different focus than than where we started originally would you have liked what would you have liked to see Apple do differently I would like to have seen them open up to a third-party ecosystem much earlier that's something that we're doing now we think that that sort of the big missing piece that if you look at something like the the App Store is a perfect metaphor for this so the iPhone actually launched in 2007 with just a few Apple apps on it you know weather and some very basic things but when the App Store opened and sort of unleash the creativity of the developers around the world that that changed the world now you took the rare step of selling your next startup viv to Samsung and not a major US tech company why so one of the big focus for us in the viv world was ubiquity and when you look at the fact that Samsung sells 500 million devices a year of all different types we saw an opportunity to take our technology and really put it in a place where it could affect many millions of people around the world lots of different contexts different types of devices just a mat the sheer scale that Samsung has is just an ideal platform you just reintroduced vixy Samsung's AI voice assistant to Samsung's developers what makes you think that Bixby can compete with Apple and Amazon and Google at this point well so one of the points I made at the talk yesterday was that people don't remember this but Google was actually the 14th search engine to enter the market so is there I think we're still in a chapter one or not barely even reading the introduction to this story so I don't believe that there's a timing issue here what we want to do is really gain momentum and get the world of developers in sort of an app store like way but bring that to AI and when you have a thousand things that you can do with an assistant becomes a much more important part of your day so when it comes to assistants do you think we'll end up relying on just one or two as with Google just one and or do you see us using many assistants or in the future I think that ultimately it's going to boil down to a few but I think you'll see minor assistants and that will specialize in some things be a part of that game but I think ultimately because it requires it to become such an important part of your life all the personalization everything that it learns about you your habits your preferences I think that ultimately people will use one far more than others so I do think it becomes more like the search market do you see this being integrated into washing machines and refrigerators and what does that world look like it's already happening so you'll actually see that sooner rather than later a lot of Samsung yeah within a few years big speed will be on a billion devices and that's just in Samsung and then we're gonna open it up to other third-party hardware as well what do you say to people who think these listening devices are creepy and you know maybe they don't want it in their living room they don't and they don't trust Apple and Amazon and Google and Samsung not to listen to them when they don't want them to be listening I would say don't buy them but the actual you know the reality is that that all the companies that I've been associated with take the privacy and security aspect of this very seriously so people have asked me so is my Alexa listening to me or my home pod or my Vic's feet you know the answer is no it's listening for what's what's called a wake word and the wake word is you know the thing that lets it know that you're ready to tell it something to give it some sort of a command but you know I did a bigger risk is yes there's some security concerns when your whole house is full of devices that could possibly listen in there's security risk with hackers or somebody you know breaking in but it's not with the companies themselves there's no sort of behind-the-scenes conspiracy to listen in to what everyone's doing

Channel: Bloomberg Technology

Views: 284,497

Keywords: Bloomberg

Id: di9ZjKCyXUw

Length: 9min 7sec (547 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 14 2018