To date, the most successful implementations of artificial intelligence in the consumer-facing space have been from the biggest players on the market. Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Echo have become near-household products, but that doesn’t mean there’s no more room for smaller players to shake up the future of AI.
In interviews with The Verge, several startups working on AI-powered virtual assistants gave their reasons for why Amazon and Apple aren’t the only ones who can claim the mantle of data-powered personalized services. Dennis Mortensen, co-founder and CEO at X.ai, the maker of an automated personal assistant, explained that the AI market is particularly suited to disruption by smaller players – as long as the tech is up to snuff, anything is possible – even when smaller companies’ resources are dwarfed by larger and more established competitors.
“In a no-data setting, the playing field is largely evened out,” Mortensen told The Verge. “This is why you see us being able to compete on meeting scheduling even though we do not run Gmail. Or perhaps a better example, why you see Google being able to compete with the automobile industry on self-driving cars, even though they only have about 60 cars on the road and GM has millions of cars with sensors on the road.”
Case in point – in March, Viv CEO Dag Kittlaus took to the stage at Disrupt NY to tout why his company’s take on AI assistants is worth betting on in the fight against much larger competitors. Kittlaus explained that Viv has been designed to write its own customized programs when necessary instead of waiting on humans to do so, and according to him, it’s advances like these that will help Viv and X.ai take down their brand-name rivals.
“It’s going to change the way programmers work with computers, because they are no longer required to actually teach the computer step by step, coding every single line,” Kittlaus said.
