What could Amazon do with its own virtual assistant app?

Amazon has reportedly purchased Evi, a British startup that has developed its own spin on Apple’s Siri, for $26 million, TechCrunch reports.

Naturally, Evi, its investors Octopus Ventures, and Amazon aren’t commenting on the deal. But public records show that something definitely went down between Evi and Amazon. The companies now share the same Company Secretary and Mitre Secretaries, and Octopus Ventures’ records show that they’ve disposed of their shares in the company.

The acquisition of Evi is particularly interesting considering Amazon bought the text-to-speech company Ivona Software in January. Amazon is already using Ivona’s software for the Kindle Fire’s voice guide, but it also has plenty of potential to help make Evi’s virtual assistant client even smarter.

Amazon has been rumored to be working on a smartphone since last year. But in the aftermath of Facebook Home, I wonder if Amazon even needs to play the hardware game at all. The company’s Kindle Fire was a smashing success because there weren’t any other inexpensive tablets on the market — that’s certainly not the case for Android handsets.

Like Facebook, Amazon already has popular apps on every mobile platform. And also just like Facebook, it’s in Amazon’s best interest to keep users in its apps as long as possible. Perhaps we could see Amazon transform Evi’s technology into more of a virtual shopping assistant (that’s also smart enough to tell you the weather and random trivia).

Imagine asking Amazon’s app to find you the best deals for Mother’s Day. Since Amazon already gives you recommendations based on your purchase history, its virtual shopping assistant could be like a friendly shopping buddy who knows your size and tastes.

At this point, Amazon’s plans are still a mystery. But making its apps more fun and engaging makes a lot more sense then spewing out another Android phone.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Like one part Siri and one part morning news update, a new app called Winston could change the way you consume news online.

Launching today on the iPhone for free, Winston reads aloud recent news and social media updates through a distinguished electronic English accent. The app summarizes news to highlight the juicy bits, and it also translates your Twitter and Facebook updates into easily absorbed nuggets (ignoring hashtags, abbreviations, and the usual social media mess).

Think of it like an NPR news brief mixed together with a news reading app like Pulse, and you’ll get an idea of what Winston’s developer Reactor Labs is up to.

“There are plenty of times during the day when we realized people can’t read a screen,” Reactor Labs co-founder and chief executive Aaron Ting told VentureBeat in an interview last week.

In particular, Ting and his team built Winston with a typical wake up experience in mind — when you’ll likely be groggy, and may only need a quick summary of breaking news and weather. (Gorgeous imagery plays alongside the stories, though it’s not entirely necessary to watch.) The app also sports Airplay support, so you can easily throw its updates over to an Airplay speaker or Apple TV as you’re eating breakfast.

Reactor Labs plans to eventually allow Winston to access your daily agenda and add voice commands, both of which will make Winston seem even more like a loyal butler. Ting notes that Winston also sorts every bit of content it receives through semantic analysis, and it pays attention to the content you interact with. Basically, it’s always getting smarter.

In my brief testing, I found Winston to be gorgeously designed and I loved its approach to news clips. Even though it summarizes news posts, it generally does a great job of delivering the most relevant information. Winston was less successful with social media updates, often getting hung up on Twitter user names and the actual intent of particular updates. When it did work, Winston’s social media summaries were also fairly uninformative, with updates like “Joe tweeted about Facebook,” and “Jane had something negative to say about Twitter.”

But Winston is yet young, so I’m confident Reactor Labs can iron out its social media kinks. There have been other attempts at apps that read aloud your news, like Voice Brief and Read it Aloud, but Winston’s combination of smart summarizing technology and semantic analysis makes it far more compelling than anything that has come before.

Reactor Labs is based in Boulder, Colorado and has raised $750,000 in seed funding from Forest Ventures.

Personal assistants or PA’s are considered a luxury for the rich and famous — the type that routinely say, “Have your people talk to my people.”

Zirtual wants to make it easier and more affordable for busy professionals to retain an assistant. The company connects its registered clients, primarily small business owners and entrepreneurs, with virtual helpers. It’s far cheaper than hiring a personal assistant but gives you more oversight than you’d have if you hired a random stranger to complete a task through a service like TaskRabbit.

The company today raised $2 million to build-out the product, so it can bring on more clients and “Zirtual” assistants. According to Zirtual’s CEO Maren Donovan (pictured below), Zappos‘ CEO Tony Hsieh invested in the startup’s first round as he admired the culture and emphasis on customer service. Zappos is well known for the lengths its customer service representatives will go to satisfy users — employees receive seven weeks of training on making customers happy.

““I was attracted to Zirtual the same reason why I was attracted to Zappos in the early days,” said Hsieh.

Donovan told me the service is invite-only as demand has always outstripped supply. “I’ve always thought that when people delegate, they can be far more productive,” she said. The company has hired 13 full-time staff since launching in 2011, but Donovan is on the lookout for developers to add to the team.

The startup has signed on about 100 U.S.-based assistants (most are college students) that handle a variety of tasks, like scheduling meetings and booking flights. Clients pay anywhere from $197 to $997 per month, and the virtual assistants keep a 50 percent cut.

Donovan said Zirtual’s assistants have received a range of requests from the mundane to the downright bizarre. Time-crunched entrepreneurs will often ask their assistants to help them find a date, research their background and interests, and reserve a table at a romantic restaurant. These requests remain private: Assistants are required to sign a confidentiality agreement with Zirtual.

The San Francisco-based company directly competes with FancyHands, a New York-based startup, and outsourced personal assistants in countries like India and the Philippines that are available to answer emails and perform basic tasks at a fraction of the cost.

The company pulled in its first round of funding from Hsieh through his VegasTechFund, and the Mayfield Fund. It will open an office in downtown Las Vegas as part of Hsieh’s ongoing effort to revitalize the area.

Customer service representative image //  Andresr, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

IBM’s Watson supercomputer has already proven that it can trounce puny humans in Jeopardy. Now the company is positioning Watson as a smarter successor to Siri, Apple’s popular (but often ditzy) iPhone virtual assistant.

But first, IBM has to make Watson less of a power hog for mobile devices and give it additional “senses” (such as voice and image recognition), the company told Bloomberg’s Sarah Frier.

When Watson was first announced in January 2011, IBM termed it as “an analytical computing system that specializes in natural human language and provides specific answers to complex questions at rapid speeds.” Jeopardy was a fantastic way to show off Watson’s rapid-fire manner of thinking, as well as its capability to understand the way humans normally speak.

Even though much of Watson’s brain sits in IBM Research’s Yorktown Heights, New York headquarters, the company says that Watson’s current software would still be too overwhelming for mobile devices. IBM is working on an upgraded “Watson 2.0″ that will be more energy efficient for tablets and smartphones. The addition of “senses” would also make Watson more aware of its environment, which would be an important part of bringing the service to mobile.

Don’t expect to see Watson releasing a standalone Watson app anytime soon though. The company says it’s focusing on corporate customers for now.

Focusing on mobile devices seems like a logical direction for Watson, especially as mobile devices get faster and 4G LTE networks make it easier to transmit huge amounts of data. It’s also one of the many ways IBM expects to increase its business analytics revenue to $16 billion by 2015, the company told Bloomberg.

Much like how Wolfram Alpha adds all sorts of interesting reference and computational capabilities to Siri, Watson could tap into a wealth of information online, along with sensor data from your smartphone, to help you make complex decisions.

In the example Bloomberg gives, a farmer could ask Watson for the best spot in his field to plant corn. Watson could then tap into historical records, location data, and recent scientific research to give an informed response. (And yes, this all sounds a bit like a proto-Skynet.)

Since the beginning, IBM also mentioned that Watson could be a useful tool for the healthcare industry, especially when it comes to making diagnoses. (The company also formed a research partnership with Nuance last year to help prepare Watson for health care purposes.) Going mobile would further Watson’s usefulness for doctors and patients alike.

IBM is testing a program that would allow patients to detail symptoms to Watson, and the A.I. would then offer up potential diagnoses. The company says Watson will eventually be well versed enough in oncology to help with diagnosis and prescriptions. For now IBM is developing this capability for doctors, but eventually it sounds like patients may be able to tap into Watson’s medical smarts on their own.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Even though Nuance’s desktop voice recognition software is getting a bit long in the tooth, the company clearly understands the potential for its technology in mobile devices, after powering Apple’s Siri and releasing useful apps of its own.

Today Nuance announced Nina, a collection of personal assistant technologies that will bring Siri-like functionality to customer service mobile apps for the likes of banks and insurance companies. Using a combination of voice biometrics, speech recognition, natural language recognition, and other Nuance tech, Nina will be able to recognize your voice and also step you through customer service options.

Basically, Nina could mean the end of convoluted customer service phone trees. It’s also the natural progression for Nuance’s voice recognition technology, which, in addition to powering Apple’s Siri, runs dictation on Android and other mobile platforms.

Naturally, Nina includes a software development kit for developers to tap into, and it comes with a pre-made virtual assistant persona. Developers can also customize the persona to their apps — allowing for a more intimate customer service experience than a traditional phone tree. Nina is powered by Nuance’s Virtual Assistant Cloud, which handles all of the heavy-duty processing for voice recognition (so it’s not entirely reliant on your device). The company claims that Nina is the first virtual assistant software to combine voice biometrics and voice recognition.

Nuance announced today that the USAA, which provides banking services to the U.S. military, has already signed up to use Nina in its app. The USAA will launch a pilot program featuring Nina in August, and all of its members will have access to the technology in early 2013.

Nuance is targeting Nina at large businesses instead of small indie developers. Businesses can sign up for Nina starting today.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s pretty clear now that you can’t have a modern smartphone operating system without powerful Siri-like voice commands. So it’s not too surprising to see familiar-sounding voice commands in the latest update to RIM’s BlackBerry 10 Developer Alpha release.

As N4BB’s Lucas Atkins shows in the video below, the voice command feature sounds a lot like Apple’s iconic virtual assistant. Though it becomes clear pretty quickly that RIM’s solution needs a bit more schooling.

While voice commands have been around for some time now in mobile devices, Apple’s Siri pushed things forward significantly last year when it launched on the iPhone 4S. Siri was smart enough to have basic conversations with you, and it could do much more than just call someone from your contact list. Samsung tried to replicate Siri’s success with S Voice on the Galaxy S III, and Google has shown off its own voice assistant feature for Android Jelly Bean, dubbed Google Now.

The voice command feature is accessed by holding down the pause/play button on N4BB’s BB10 developer unit, and there’s surprisingly no visual interface for it yet. Instead, you hear a robotic voice asking you to “say a command after the beep” (which makes me think of an old answering machine, more than a next-gen OS). After that, you can issue commands to the phone, which are followed up by a Siri-sounding voice.

Atkins asked his BB10 device to search for “BlackBerry,” and it displayed a universal search page with results from the web, the BlackBerry App World, and items on his device. Later attempts to message and call people from his contact list failed, and the voice command system also falls apart hilariously when he asks to cancel the commands.

Given just how much BB10′s virtual assistant resembles Siri, it’s very likely that RIM is also tapping into Nuance’s text-to-speech technology like Apple, Google, and several Android manufacturers.

Image via N4BB

Forget the company conference room. Coworkers no longer need to be in the same office space — let alone the same time zone — to hold a productive progress reports or brainstorming session. We asked nine young entrepreneurs about how they conduct virtual meetings between their startup teams, and actually get things done while doing so. (Share your own thoughts in the comments.)

Stick to the agenda

Since it’s incredibly easy to get off task in a virtual meeting, it’s important to have an agenda, listing only a few goals of the meeting and complete with an overall time limit. Designate someone to lead the meeting and hold that person accountable for making sure everyone stays on topic to move the meeting along.

Nick Friedman, @NickFriedman1, College Hunks Hauling Junk

Start the meeting beforehand

Sending supporting information before the meeting can often help save you time in the meeting, since everyone is already briefed on the basics. If the meeting is just about making a decision, it can often be fast and productive.

Jason Evanish, @Evanish, Greenhorn Connect

Remember, the clock is ticking

For even more efficiency, put a time limit on each subject of the agenda and ruthlessly cut off rambling. Virtual teams are just as susceptible to unfocused meetings, so having an impartial, third-party reference makes it easier to transition topics and stay focused.

Kelly Azevedo, @krazevedo, She’s Got Systems

Try to shut up

I speak too much. One thing I am constantly trying to work on is asking better questions, and then just listening and letting my team interact. Virtual meetings can be productive if everyone comes together to express what is going well and what they need help on. Also, using the group to throw out potential solutions often reveals a great idea.

Patrick Curtis, @WallStreetOasis, WallStreetOasis.com

Follow up afterwards

Make sure to end the meeting with a list of followup tasks and owners, and have someone distribute by email to the entire team.

Michael Tolkin, Merchant Exchange

Set a schedule of speakers

The main reason for meetings is to give different people a chance to speak. That means that you need to make sure that attendees know that they’re expected to do just that. When you’re planning out your agenda, assign a few speaking slots and make sure that your speakers know what they need to cover. Of course, you do want to have some unstructured time, but balance it out.

Thursday Bram, @thursdayb, Hyper Modern Consulting

Peer pressure turns off multitasking

Without fail, people zone out on conference calls. Have your team use Google+ Hangouts (or another group video chat) so that everyone is actually “present.” Seeing everyone’s face will bring extra energy to the meeting and, of course, it will help you make sure that no one is on their phone or emailing so that you can get the most out of the important virtual chat.

Aaron Schwartz, @ModifyWatches, Modify Watches

Ask yourself, do we really need to have this meeting?

Your first question should always be: Do we need this meeting at all? If a meeting is not necessary because you have nothing substantial to discuss or you could accomplish your goals just as well through another faster method, cancel it.

Elizabeth Saunders, @RealLifeE, Real Life E®

Try weekly reports instead

I manage my virtual team by outlining and sharing the following week’s worth of tasks and projects on Sunday night. For the more urgent projects, I then require daily updates at the end of each day. For everything else, each team member must submit and share their progress at the end of the week. Then, it’s up to the team to analyze everyone else’s work and collaborate for the next week.

Logan Lenz, @loganlenz, Endagon

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), an invite-only nonprofit organization composed of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC promotes entrepreneurship as a solution to unemployment and underemployment and provides entrepreneurs with access to tools, mentorship, and resources that support each stage of their business’s development and growth.

Virtual meeting photo via dpstyles/Flickr

Working team via Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s Steve Jobs saw the potential in Siri back when it was a standalone application, but when it came to integrating the software into the iPhone as a virtual assistant he was resistant to keeping the name Siri, according to Siri co-founder (and former CEO) Dag Kittlaus.

Speaking at the Chicago startup event Technori Pitch yesterday, Kittlaus regaled the story of how he came up with the name Siri, and Steve Job’s initial hesitance to keeping the name, reports Network World.

Shortly after the iPhone 4S release last October, Siri quickly reached iconic status in popular culture. It was partly due to Siri’s sometimes magical capabilities, and partly to Apple’s slick marketing efforts. But Siri’s simple and unusual name likely helped cement it into the public mind as well.

Kittlaus explained that Siri means “beautiful woman who leads you to victory” in Norwegian, and it was also a name he was saving for his future daughter. But after his first child ended up being a boy, he ended up shelving the name until it came time to name his software.

During his discussions with Apple, he pushed to keep the name even though Jobs wanted to use something else. After failing to find an alternative, Siri ended up being the name of Apple’s new virtual assistant in the iPhone 4S. As Network World notes, Jobs was similarly hesitant to the names iMac and iPod — and look how that turned out.

Kittlaus described how Jobs initially got in touch with him, as recounted by Network World:

Three weeks after we launched I got a call in the office from someone at Apple that said, “Scott Forstall wants to talk to you and he’s the head software guy.”

And I said sure…

Only it wasn’t Scott that called it was Steve. And Steve never announces where he’s gonna be and what he’s gonna do because there’s too much commotion around it. So he said, “Dag, this is Steve Jobs.”

And he wanted me to come over to his house the next day, and I did, and I spent 3 hours with him in front of his fireplace having this surreal conversation about the future.

And, you know, he talked about why Apple was going to win, and we talked about how Siri was doing. And he was very excited about the fact that.. you know, he was very interested in this area in general but, you know, they’re patient, they don’t jump on anything until they feel they can go after something new and he felt that we cracked it. So that was his attraction.

I ended up very lucky, timing wise. I got to work with him for a year before he got real sick. And he’s pretty incredible. The stories are true. All of the stories.

VentureBeat is holding its second annual MobileSummit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of themobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The coolest feature in Apple’s upcoming iPhone 5 may be something unexpected: a smart, voice-operated virtual assistant — simply called Assistant — that sounds like an evolutionary upgrade over the iPhone’s current voice commands.

We’ve been hearing for some time that Apple will integrate technology from Siri, a virtual assistant mobile application company it purchased last year, into the next iPhone. But new reports today from 9to5Mac and the Unofficial Apple Weblog make Assistant sound like something more than just a voice command upgrade.

It has the potential to fundamentally change the way we interact with the iPhone.

A source detailed the Assistant feature to 9to5Mac: It’s said to be accessible by holding down the iPhone’s home button for a few seconds, after which you’re presented with a speech interface that slides up from the bottom of the screen (like iOS 4′s multi-tasking interface). The interface offers up a few example commands, as well as a visual indicator of when your iPhone is ready to take voice commands.

Assistant could tap in deeply to all sorts of functions in the iPhone 5, says 9to5Mac:

For example, one can say make appointment with Mark Gurman for 7:30 PM and Assistant will create the appointment in the user’s calendar. On noting events, Assistant also allows users to set reminders for the iOS 5 Reminders application. For example, a user could say “remind me to buy milk when I arrive at the market.” Another example would be integration with the iOS Maps application. A user could ask: “how do I get to Staples Center?” and Assistant will use the user’s current location via GPS and provide directions.

Just like a real personal assistant, the iPhone 5′s Assistant will also communicate back and forth with you to confirm what it’s doing. For example, if you tell Assistant to email a friend, it may ask which specific email address to use. The phone will both speak questions like that aloud and place them inside of a text conversation.

Assistant will only be available on the iPhone 5 because it requires beefier hardware, the sources say. The source confirms previous rumors that the iPhone 5 will run Apple’s dual-core A5 chip and a hefty 1 gigabyte of RAM.

Additionally, the source says the iPhone 5 will also include Nuance dictation support, which has been rumored to appear for some time.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Curt Carlson, the president and chief executive of SRI International, is very excited about the Siri intelligent agent technology that his organization sold to Apple in April for a rumored $150 – $250 million. He expects it will show up in future iPhones, but he also believes that SRI’s additional technologies from virtual assistant research will become part of even more rich applications in the future.

SRI was spun out of Stanford University more than 60 years ago to commercialize research. First named Stanford Research Institute and later renamed SRI International, it became independent from Stanford University in 1970 and now has more than 2,200 researchers working on things such as the cool artificial intelligence, speech recognition, natural language processing, location information, and agent technology that is part of Siri.

Siri, spun out of SRI 18 months ago, is a virtual personal assistant technology. Its first application launched in February as a free iPhone app that lets you perform tasks such as making dinner reservations by speaking into your phone and letting a virtual assistant do the rest. Apple bought Siri for an undisclosed price, and Carlson likens the event to Steve Jobs’ prescient move in adopting the computer mouse — invented by SRI researcher Doug Engelbart four decades ago.

“Siri was bought by Apple before it had any revenue for a very nice premium,” said Carlson (pictured at top) in an interview. “You can guess what will be in the next iPhone. This technology could be as ubiquitous as the PC-mouse user interface that was created by Doug Engelbart here more than 40 years ago.”

“I think Doug transformed every personal computer with his invention,” Carlson added. “I believe this technology has the potential to be seen 15 or 20 years from now as the next big revolution in personal computing. Steve Jobs is always prescient. He was one of the first to get a license from us for the computer mouse too.”

Siri can do interesting tasks now. You can speak into your phone that you want to find a romantic restaurant for two in Menlo Park. Siri will ask you if you want it within walking distance of your hotel or if you want Italian food as you liked before. Once you answer, it will send back to your iPhone an Open Table reservation for two at a restaurant that it recommends.

It’s somewhat surprising that something that makes its debut as a free iPhone app could come from SRI, which is known for its heavy-duty research and development that gave us things like automated check processing, the PC, wireless communication, robotics, ultrasound, speech recognition and high-definition TV. But Carlson, who has been CEO for 11 years at SRI, says that the institute’s focus on innovation has never been sharper. He drills lessons about market relevance and the fundamentals of creating value into every new employee — even the janitors. And today, with more than 200,000 iPhone apps, there’s never been a better way to get an immediate read on how useful a technology is.

Siri came from a collection of inventions. SRI had a very famous artificial intelligence group that created a solution with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). SRI started doing intelligent agent research in the early 1990s. In 2001, it started a program called Vanguard aimed at making mobile phones into the next computers.

In 2003, SRI got a $150 million grant to start CALO — the Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes — to develop virtual assistant technology over five years. The effort included 25 world class partners and it incubated ideas from government and commercial researchers.

One of the projects that the military is interested in is the Command Post for the Future. It is an assistant for generals in a command post that helps make decisions about how to fight wars or skirmishes.

Commercialization of ideas started four or five years ago under the lead of Norman Winarsky, vice president of ventures, licensing and strategic programs at SRI. In that process, SRI takes its ideas and finds an entrepreneur in residence to make the idea into a startup. If they can figure out a big market opportunity and a compelling business model, they launch it. That’s what happened with Siri. Upon being spun out, Siri got another $24 million from Menlo Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures.

But Siri isn’t the end of SRI’s research. It is just one part of it. Another startup using the SRI technology is Chattertrap, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup that will apply the personal assistant concept to online content. The idea is to create a personal information service by figuring out what kind of news you like and delivering a personalized newspaper to you.

At some point, you want the virtual assistant to be as smart as someone talking to you on the phone and doing Google searches to answer your questions. Speech recognition is a part of the solution, but SRI hopes to aggregate a bunch of technologies that can answer your questions in real-time, even when you are speaking in a conversational manner.

Winarsky said in an interview that “this technology is intended for many more markets than just a phone. I think this is the dawn of the age of the virtual personal assistant. You will be able to use it in everything from healthcare to shopping to sales. Apple bought what they needed to do Siri. But that is just the spark of what could happen here. There are many more applications coming.”

Will it work as advertised? Carlson said, “Even professor John McCarthy at Stanford was working on this 40 years ago. It hasn’t been realized because it turned out to be a really hard problem. This is the Holy Grail.”

Don’t miss MobileBeat 2010, VentureBeat’s conference on the future of mobile. The theme: “The year of the superphone and who will profit.” Now expanded to two days, MobileBeat 2010 will take place on July 12-13 at The Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Register now. Tickets are going quickly. For complete conference details, or to apply for the MobileBeat Startup Competition, click here.