ROSE-SHOW-01
Cooper Ramo is here is co-chief executive officer and vice chairman of
Kissinger Associates AND began his career as a journalist and was the
youngest foreign editor in Time Magazine`s history. His new book is
called, The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of
Networks. There is a new-generation virtual assistant powered by artificial
intelligence to "enable everyone to talk to everything." - Part 2>
Artificial Intelligence; Viv; Lifestyle; Entertainment>
CHARLIE ROSE: It is called the discitis
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Yeah. Discitis, that what they call it, which is the rising power against the establishment.
CHARLIE ROSE: The interesting thing about this too, is in the last week as a commercial transaction, Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.2 billion. What does LinkedIn have? It has 320 million people.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: Who are part of a network.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: That network.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: The network is so valuable.
CHARLIE ROSE: But these are people in business and enterprise. It`s not like Facebook.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Right
CHARLIE ROSE: . which is every teenager and everybody else around.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: What it has, I mean, also what it has is data.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: And that in the future really turns out to be valuable. So, if you look at what is -- what is the next of these like billion user platforms, where we have Facebook -- we know the more people use it the better it get, the more people use it. We`re going to see that happen in the world of artificial intelligence as well, which is probably the next great platform. The more people using it the smarter it gets, the more people use it. So LinkedIn in that world suddenly becomes just a wonderful data mine for how people interact, where they are going, how they think about things.
CHARLIE ROSE: You also say that anytime that you plug something into the network, you forever alter its nature.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Yeah. You are what you`re connected to. And I think, you know, the main example of this for all of us now, you know, we see this now with this, you know, horrible domestic activated terrorism, in Orlando, is that the minute you connect to the world, you`ve no idea where you`re connected to, and so it brings risks back at it, at you at the same time it brings opportunity. And just have accept that that is a feature of the network.
CHARLIE ROSE: And it creates influences that you have no idea.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Yeah, and you can`t even see.
CHARLIE ROSE: I`m just was struck by the language of the gunman in Orlando. I mean, he had been inspired by, he`d been influenced by. He was, I think, he said, you know, some of the term of -- he was connected to.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: . ISIL.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Yeah. No, connection, and that is this ability to remotely -- if you look at the history of -- my last book, I began with spending time with the chief technology officer of Hezbollah. And if you just think about the evolution of terrorism to -- from Hezbollah, to al- Qaeda, to ISIS, you`re mapping really the technological evolution.
CHARLIE ROSE: And the scary thing is that we know this because of what`s happened with San Bernardino, that presented one of the questions, but also what you saw in Paris, where they`re using apps that are encrypted.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: Providing a huge new problem for law enforcement.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Right. And it just changes all of this technology.
CHARLIE ROSE: And bad guys use the technology the same way good guys do.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: We have issues with drones, all these things. So it really changes the kind of fundamental nature of what you face. Having said that, if you think about the long-term position of the United States, the greatest threat we face is not terrorist, terrorism is not going to wipe out the United States. It`s not like facing Russia in the 1950`s which can wipe us out. It is not an existential threat. It`s kind of psychological warfare. Psychological warfare is made much more effective by networks. The only existential threat that faces the United States today is the emergence of these networks for trade, finance, for DNA, for data. And as long as the U.S. can maintain that central position, these are the things that will matter.
CHARLIE ROSE: And psychological superiority.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: That`s right.
CHARLIE ROSE: Any guarantee we can do that?
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Well, I mean, a lot of it depends on basic architectural questions.
CHARLIE ROSE: But it also depends on the quality of your educational institutions.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Absolutely.
CHARLIE ROSE: United States has 18 of the best 20 universities of the world.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Educational institution, I think, the value of the society that encourage innovation, all these other sort of things. It`s not an accident that those 8 billion user platforms are all American platforms. If you ask, to say, if you had to have a picture in your head of the international system, 15 or 20 years, time, and we know it`s going to be different because the one thing we know as we look around the system today is that the legitimacy of every existing institution is just collapsing, whether it`s the IMF, or congress, so something has got to be built. And not bad picture is a set of these interconnected communities, these gate-kept worlds that run on certain values. And they`ll all have this property that the more people use them, the better they get, so the more people will use them.
CHARLIE ROSE: You know I interviewed President Obama not long ago. You know, and I am asking this question that you believe the United States has the best military, you have the best technology, the biggest and best economy, down the line.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: You know, and say what could go wrong, and he said, our politics could go wrong.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: We have to fix our politics or we cannot, because if your politics are frozen, and you are even notwithstanding networks and everything else.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: There is the limit in your capacity to apply all the networks.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Yeah. Very Henry Kissinger, the great line of henry, the acid test of any foreign policy is its ability to withstand domestic politics. And that`s 100 percent right in this case. And the networks are doing to politics and to our economics thing that are, actually, not helpful to this cause. And that`s why we`ve got to learn, actually, to design them in a better way, which I`ve talked about in the book, so you could avoid these problems.
CHARLIE ROSE: Congratulations. The Seventh Sense is a book, Joshua Cooper Ramo. He was the author of another book which was an international best seller called, The Age of the Unthinkable, subtitle here, power, fortune, and survival in the age of networks, thank you.
JOSHUA COPPER RAMO: Thanks, a pleasure, always.
CHARLIE ROSE: Back in a moment, stay with us.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
CHARLIE ROSE: Dag Kittlaus is here. He`s CEO and cofounder of Viv. Vis is a new generation virtual assistant powered by artificial intelligence. Its goal is to open A.I., artificial intelligence to the world, and quote, enable everyone to talked to everything.
Writing for medium John Battelle said, what Viv is trying to create is a platform shift on the scale of Goggle search or Apple`s app store, a new way to interact with the internet itself.
Kittlaus previously co-founded Siri, the groundbreaking voice assistant technology purchased by Apple in 2010. I am pleased to have him at this table for the first time. Welcome.
DAG KITTLAUS, CO-FOUNDER OF SIRI: Thanks so much, Charlie.
CHARLIE ROSE: A.I. assistance. Lay out the landscape for me.
DAG KITTLAUS: Well, so actually the vision for this type of paradigm has been inspired by Hollywood since the days of Hal 9000, only nicer, is the goal this time around.
And then Apple came out with something called the knowledge navigator which has sort of been an inspiration for a lot of people that are in this business now as well which was a kind of a scenario that they visualized, talked about, had this person come into a room and was essentially their virtual assistant that we are all shooting to build today.
But now we`ve got -- we launched this independently in 2010 and soon after, Apple acquired us and really brought this to the world. So ever since then, now every one of the top tech companies is spending billions of dollars from what I call the race to the single interface.
CHARLIE ROSE: What does that mean?
DAG KITTLAUS: That means that when you can talk to something, or to the computer, a device, it knows you, it is such a natural interaction. It`s just a simpler way to do things.
And because of that, more and more -- more and more devices, more and more services want to be a part of being that simple to use and that sort of becomes a paradigm in and of itself.
So talking to things becomes the future way to interact with almost any kind of device and any kind of service. It`s just simpler.
CHARLIE ROSE: Five years and then we`ll be doing what?
DAG KITTLAUS: All sorts of things. So you are already talking to some -- everyone starts and thinks about the phone because of Siri, but you`ll be talking to your car.
You will be -- there is a billion hours of wasted commute time just sitting in traffic in the United States every year. So, why not Christmas shop while you are in there, talking to your assistant and telling what to do and who to send it to and what to put on the card or having -- ordering food that is going to be ready to be -- that`s going to 10 minutes behind you when you get home in the car.
So that would be like an in-car scenario for what the systems might do.
CHARLIE ROSE: You have said the goal for Viv is ubiquity.
DAG KITTLAUS: Yes. So we want to enable all the device-makers. We`ve had people who like toy companies come to us and say, I want to have a teddy bear that helps us teach our children how to do math. It`s a really cool idea I just don`t know how to do the talking to part.
So this is sort of a scarce resource that we want to unleash and let anyone who wants to apply it to any kind of device do that. And they build a market place of services around it so developers can come in and plug in, essentially, to Viv and becomes thousands of times more powerful than anything.
CHARLIE ROSE: Did you develop Siri outside of Apple and then it was purchased by Apple?
DAG KITTLAUS: Correct. Yeah. Actually, the technology for Siri was originally SRI which is -- SRI International, a Stanford research. And we spun that out in 2008 and we started a company, a startup, and worked down and perfected that to the first real consumer product which we then launched in 2010.
And about three weeks later, I was going out to lunch and my business guy came in and said, you know Scott Forstall from Apple would like to talk to you. And I said, great. And my phone rang and I saw it was from Cupertino, and if you have an iPhone, of course, you know how you have to swipe it, well, it kept bouncing back, it wouldn`t answer the phone, it was like on the seventh swipe. I picked it up and it was a gentleman that said, hey, this is Steve Jobs. And ...
CHARLIE ROSE: What did he say?
DAG KITTLAUS: He said, in a nutshell, he said, we love what you are doing. Can you come over to my house tomorrow? Love to talk to you about it.
CHARLIE ROSE: And what did you do?
DAG KITTLAUS: I grabbed my two founders and we went and we spent three hours with Steve in front of his fireplace talking about the future and he made the case for how iPhone was going to win the Smartphone wars and how we could work together to change the way people interact with them.
CHARLIE ROSE: And then when did they say we want to buy your company?
DAG KITTLAUS: We had some back and forth negotiation stuff, but it was a few months later that we decided to go ahead and move forward with it.
CHARLIE ROSE: And what role do you think it has played in the iPhone?
DAG KITTLAUS: Well, I think it was a crucial part of the 4S launch. It was also introducing this new paradigm on the world in a way only Apple knows how to do properly and it was very exciting to watch our baby get taken on such an international stage and I think they did a wonderful job with it.
CHARLIE ROSE: So why did you leave to start another company?
DAG KITTLAUS: Actually, I left for over reasons. And eventually came around to talk to some other entrepreneurs a couple of years later. We just were brain storming what was going on and we ultimately decided Siri is, and all of the other assistants, are really just chapter one in a much bigger, more important story.
So we started thinking about what would we need to do to really scale this up? How do you make this ubiquitous? What are the key aspects to that compared to what`s ...
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: It`s a question what technology do we need or some other thing we need?
DAG KITTLAUS: Well, we start with what is missing and it`s analogous to what I would ...
CHARLIE ROSE: What end product?
DAG KITTLAUS: What market ...
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: Or what ability to function.
DAG KITTLAUS: What have to get involved with this and then what technology would enable that?
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
DAG KITTLAUS: So, what I liken it to is the launch of the iPhone in 2007 where they launched with only Apple apps. There were about eight apps, it`s stock, and clock, and watch and that kind of stuff, but then they opened up the app store and that changed the world, unleashing this third parties, and that is sort of where artificial intelligence is in the virtual assistance base.
If you look at all of the players out there today, they all do a few dozen things and they are very similar things to each other. But what we want to do is take that and make it ...
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: Did I read somewhere that five apps occupy 85 percent of the app business or something like that?
DAG KITTLAUS: Yeah. Yeah. So Facebook and a few others, messaging is really big. And so, yeah, there are a few apps that sort of dominate people`s attention and downloads and time.
CHARLIE ROSE: Is this the next paradigm? I mean, this is ...
DAG KITTLAUS: We believe so and apparently every other one of the top tech companies believes so as well because ...
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: Because they back it up with money and huge investments.
DAG KITTLAUS: Yeah. I think everybody sees where this is headed. It`s sort of a world that starts to move beyond the app itself because if you think about this Internet of Things that you are hearing about, talking to different devices in a natural way, that doesn`t work in sort of an app world where we have to -- you are not going to be downloading apps to your refrigerator ...
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: I don`t think.
DAG KITTLAUS: ... or to your mirror in your bathroom. You need something in the Cloud. So.
CHARLIE ROSE: On a scale of zero to a hundred, where are we in voice recognition?
DAG KITTLAUS: So are you familiar with merrymakers internet?
CHARLIE ROSE: Of course, yeah.
DAG KITTLAUS: So she`s talking about, as a source, yeah, she`s great. She says we`re between 90 and 95 percent in voice recognition accuracy. I`m not sure what the parameters and where she gets the number. But as we approach 99 percent quality and suddenly it becomes much more mass market phenomenon.
So that`s one of the keys. You have to get past a certain threshold of quality. And then suddenly it becomes a natural thing to do because it just works.
CHARLIE ROSE: And we have done that or are we 95 percent close?
DAG KITTLAUS: We`re not there yet. We`re not there yet but we`re getting close enough where most people, if they speak relatively clearly, it works very well for. And that`s evidenced by the fact that, you know, Siri gets a hundred billion queries a year, 22 billion queries.
CHARLIE ROSE: Within a year (ph).
DAG KITTLAUS: Yeah. So they just announce ...
CHARLIE ROSE: Siri, tell me where.
DAG KITTLAUS: Yeah. Yeah. And it`s ...
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: And what would Viv do that Siri can`t?
DAG KITTLAUS: Well, Viv is designed to as a -- we talked a little bit about to allow any third party to come in and build something new to it. So the difference today is that most of these folks decide what their road map is going to be. Some product manager will lay out a road map and they will build it.
But now, we`re talking about our official intelligence in more of a Wikipedia-like model where anyone can decide that they want to build something to it, be it a large company, a bank can create a new way to interact with their own customers or any individual can go in and plug in Johnny`s soccer schedule and which field is the game on, on Saturday.
So, the difference there is that this system is built from the ground up to be able to handle the world of people and developers to teach, and that, of course, allows for this Cambrian explosion of capabilities.
CHARLIE ROSE: I saw you do a thing this morning, a demonstration at CBS, this morning which will be on tomorrow, and basically you were able to say, you know, Viv, show me the flights leaving in the next half hour for ...
DAG KITTLAUS: Right. It`s easy, isn`t it?
CHARLIE ROSE: ... San Francisco. And the thing about it was instant. I mean it was almost like instant ...
DAG KITTLAUS: Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: ... that came there (ph). So far you can do what with Viv?
DAG KITTLAUS: So we have got a set of what we call showcase domains, so things. Like, travel, so hotels and flights and car rentals and things associated with travel like where should I go? A decision-making stuff. Rides like Uber and events, so what should do I this weekend? Get me tickets through Ticketmaster who are great partners, and buying flowers. So what we call conversational commerce.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
DAG KITTLAUS: We find out that typing -- or speaking, is in and of itself seven times faster than typing it, so that makes it more efficient. But when you can streamline that whole process where just a few words and you get something done, believe me, you don`t go back to the old way once you have tried it.
You want to get a hotel room, you say, get me a room at this place on Friday night.
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: And these are the specifics of the room that I like.
DAG KITTLAUS: Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: And you can -- in the front or on the waterfront and (inaudible).
DAG KITTLAUS: Yeah. Now are you hitting on ...
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: ... suite, a junior suite ...
DAG KITTLAUS: Exactly. And once you have shown some pattern towards preference on one of those it will start to learn or it will ask you or you can tell it and it will just start taking care of those details.
CHARLIE ROSE: But is the technology for Echo which is Alexa which is Amazon, whatever Google is doing, whatever Apple will do with Siri, is the technology all the same?
DAG KITTLAUS: No. It`s definitely not all the same.
CHARLIE ROSE: The underlying technology is not the same.
DAG KITTLAUS: No. I mean ...
CHARLIE ROSE: And is that what will determine who wins and loses in the end game?
DAG KITTLAUS: In part. I think -- I think you`ve got different companies have different strengths. So, speech recognition, some people are really, really good at speech recognition, Google is the best in the world and Nuance is right there and Microsoft is getting up there. I think Apple is getting up there.
CHARLIE ROSE: Why did you call it Viv?
DAG KITTLAUS: So, Viv actually means life in several languages. So the idea is just sort of Viv is going to breathe life into the inanimate objects and devices of your life through conversation.
CHARLIE ROSE: Your choice?
DAG KITTLAUS: Yeah. We chose as a founding group but I thought (ph), yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: You said it`s about taking the way humans have naturally interacted with each other for thousands of years and applying that to the way they interact with surfaces.
DAG KITTLAUS: That`s right.
CHARLIE ROSE: I mean, that is the key. You took the way we talk to each other and said that is going to be the model for how we talk.
DAG KITTLAUS: It is the simplest way. You don`t need directions on how to use this. This just comes naturally to us. So, you move to a place when there is enough scale here, where it`s almost as if you are just talking directly to the internet and it`s doing things on your behalf and it gets to know you.
And the whole thing just becomes this natural flow. You don`t have to -- I mean compare it to what we take for granted today. So, in an app world, someone has -- to even know you can do something with an app, someone told you about it, then you had to go download it, then you had to sign up for it.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
DAG KITTLAUS: Then you had to learn that particular user experience. So there are all these things, but there is a future where you will just essentially talk to the devices in your life and ask it to do something that you want it to be done without even knowing who might be able to help you do it. Os, that helps discover new capabilities.
CHARLIE ROSE: How much of this will be mobile?
DAG KITTLAUS: Oh, I think a lot, practically speaking, a large percentage of people will use their mobile phone for it but you will also start talking to your house through things like Alexa. I think you will see light bulbs that -- it is going to be an easy way to talk.
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: The first thing I do when I get up, I must be like, no one or everyone, the first thing I do is say, Alexa, you know, what is the temperature in New York City today?
DAG KITTLAUS: Yeah. Exactly. And why do you do that?
CHARLIE ROSE: I do it because I want to know instantly.
DAG KITTLAUS: And it`s the easiest way to do it.
CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah. And their genius was Alexa`s voice is pleasant.
DAG KITTLAUS: Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: That was a genius by Amazon.
DAG KITTLAUS: It`s a fabulous piece of technology. So they spent a lot of time building what they call far-field microphones so you can speak, it can understand you from across the room. You can talk actually over the top of music with the Echo, that it is playing. It can hear you on top of music is playing.
And again, like you said, the text-to-speech, it just feels like a human almost.
CHARLIE ROSE: Sure.
DAG KITTLAUS: And those little details getting close to feeling ...
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: It`s everything. If I get up and say I would like to hear over the next 15 minutes just this music, it is there.
DAG KITTLAUS: Yeah.
CHARLIE ROSE: All of that. I believe, and I know nothing about marketing and these kinds of things, but the success of Echo by Amazon will simply make life much better for everybody else because it shows the possibilities.
DAG KITTLAUS: That`s right.
CHARLIE ROSE: You know. As Steve used to say, how many of people, they don`t even know what they want, they now because of Echo know they want it.
DAG KITTLAUS: That`s right.
CHARLIE ROSE: And those who have not yet experienced it, I know of no one who has experienced it who doesn`t say it is an addition to my life that I appreciate.
DAG KITTLAUS: That`s right, that`s right.
CHARLIE ROSE: And that is the rollout of the future.
DAG KITTLAUS: Yeah. You`re scratching the surface of what the future is going to look like. So they have come up with a great piece of technology, but imagine when that can do thousands of times more things without having to think about. You just imagine ...
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: Imagine.
(CROSSTALK)
DAG KITTLAUS: That follows you around. When you leave the house, that is in your car.
CHARLIE ROSE: Right.
DAG KITTLAUS: And everywhere you go, it`s in your pocket. So this is the world that we`re seeing and I think everyone is starting to ...
CHARLIE ROSE: This is Elizabeth Dwoskin in "The Washington Post," "over the next five years that transition will turn Smartphones and perhaps smart homes and cars and other devices into virtual assistants with supercharged conversational capabilities, powered by artificial intelligence and unprecedented volumes of data.
They could become the portal through which billions of people connect to every service and every business on the internet. This is the way we`re going to connect to everything else ...
DAG KITTLAUS: Right.
CHARLIE ROSE: ... on the internet.
DAG KITTLAUS: So the rise of the assistant changes several fundamental things. It changes how you interact with the digital world in general. So user-behavior. And of course the byproduct of that is going to be how it changes how revenue flows on the internet.
So, you know, we`re going to move from what I call this discovery economy which is, let me give you some examples, travel deals. So the biggest customers of the search engines are travel companies because people still go to search engines first to find deals.
But when they can stalk to an assistant, some of the largest travel companies will have a travel agent that we can enable for them. You`re going to say, you know, find me a place to take my three kids in the last week of March in the Caribbean, and you will start a conversation and it will know your kids` ages. It will know the last five trips that you took and what your -- roughly, what your budget is.
CHARLIE ROSE: This is because of the increasing capacity of data mining.
DAG KITTLAUS: Yeah, and personalization and how you apply that to getting to know you and the ability to do more and more. So it becomes this entity and this partner in your life, this digital sidekick.
CHARLIE ROSE: Was this so important? I mean, isn`t it going to be hard for you to resist, you know, the billions of dollars they will throw at you because the five big companies, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, I mean they all are looking for an advantage and they have got the money to afford to pay for an advantage.
DAG KITTLAUS: Well, as you said earlier, our goal is ubiquity. And we`re not going to sort of figure out exactly what road is going to take us there. I mean, we feel that it was a really good decision to go with Apple with Siri because Apple brought this entire paradigm.
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: Because they`re anywhere in the world.
DAG KITTLAUS: They had a Smartphone and they are incredible marketers and they did it in a very compelling way. So you know, I don`t know exactly how this is going to pan out yet, Charlie, but we are going to go for it and finish the job that we started.
CHARLIE ROSE: Beyond this, beyond this, now broadening out to a larger canvas, where is artificial intelligence going to take us?
DAG KITTLAUS: That`s a broad question. Well, I don`t think we can start to comprehend all of the different applications that will come out of this. But you`re going to start to see more and more applications like the applications, when you saw things like the DeepMind winning. That was supposed to be ...
(CROSSTALK)
CHARLIE ROSE: Against go.
DAG KITTLAUS: Against -- yeah, Alpha go beating ...
CHARLIE ROSE: Am I right about that?
