Proposal

Talk to Me

Inside Silicon Valley’s

trillion-dollar quest for conversation

By James Vlahos

“Siri was chapter one, and now a new Internet age is coming.” —Dag Kittlaus, co-creator of Siri, CEO of Viv Labs

Submitted by:

Daniel Greenberg, Agent Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency, Inc.

307 Seventh Ave, Suite 2407 New York, New York 10001 dgreenberg@lgrliterary.com

(212) 337-0934

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Overview……………………………………………………….……………………….......3

Author ……………………………………………………………………………………..9

Audience and Comparable Titles………………………………………………………….11

Marketing and Promotion………………………………………………………………...13

Chapter Outline…………………………………………………………………………...15

Introduction………………………………………………..…………...…………16

Part One—The Song of Siri

Chapter 1 Soulful Machines…….……………………………………………17

Chapter 2 Are You for Real?………….……………..……………………….18

Chapter 3 “HAL’S Back!”……………….………………………………...…19

Chapter 4 Growing Pains………....………..…………………….…………...20

Part Two—Battle of the Bots

Chapter 5 Functionality Versus Fun………………………….………………22

Chapter 6 Enter Alexa………………..……...……………………………….23

Chapter 7 I, Chatbot……………………………….………………………...24

Chapter 8 Farewell to Apps…………..………………………………………24

Part Three—The Last Computer

Chapter 9 Best Friends Forever………….…………………………………...26

Chapter 10 Think for Yourself………………………………….……………..27

Chapter 11 The Last Computer……………………………………………….28

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OVERVIEW

The moon hung over Tehran as Keyvan Mohajer and his brother, Kamyar, stepped

from a window onto the gabled rooftop of their grandmother’s house. The two teenagers

whispered as they crept across the vertiginous slope. If they tumbled off of the four-story

building they might die; if a neighbor reported them to Iran’s Disciplinary Force, the boys

would probably end up in jail. Kamyar clutched what looked like a giant tinfoil plate, five

feet across; a black cable snaked from it to a small television that Keyvan carried. For the

next three hours, the brothers gingerly moved around and pointed their homemade satellite

dish into the starry sky. Finally, just before midnight, they burst into smiles as the static

onscreen coalesced into a crisp picture.

The year was 1992, and American programming was forbidden. But from then on,

instead of watching the two heavily censored channels that the government allowed, the two

brothers could choose from more than one hundred options, many of them showing

programing from “The Great Satan”—America. Keyvan fell in love with science fiction,

especially movies that featured sentient robots like C3PO and the Terminator. It boggled his

mind to think that people might one day invent machines that you could talk to and that

would talk right back. Machines that came to life. Captivated, Keyvan told his brother that

artificial intelligence was going to be his life’s work.

In 2004, having emigrated to the United States and earned a Ph.D. at Stanford, where

he focused on natural language processing, Keyvan Mohajer made the rounds with venture

capital firms in Silicon Valley. His pitch was simple. “In 10 to 20 years there will be a

transformation,” he would say. “Human-computer interaction will be based on voice—we

talk to computers, they talk back to us.” The investors weren’t so sure. The dream of

creating conversationally capable computers was nearly as old as computers themselves, but

nobody had convincingly pulled off this feat. Don’t tell us what you think you can invent in

10 to 20 years, the investors told Mohajer. Tell us what you can do in three.

Pivoting to what outwardly seemed like an unrelated idea, Mohajer and three other

Stanford students set their sights on creating software that allowed users to identify any

unknown song simply by humming a few bars. After packing Mohajer’s dorm room with 20

computers and working for most of 2005, Keyvan sang a dozen mournful notes into a

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microphone on Christmas Eve. When the software correctly identified the theme from “The

Godfather,” Mohajer started laughing and crying at the same time.

SoundHound, the company that Mohajer and his partners launched, grew to employ

more than 150 people and had its music app downloaded more than 260 million times. All

along, though, Mohajer harbored a secret: He had never given up on teaching computers to talk.

SoundHound had covertly pursued conversational technology ever since 2005. The music

app was in fact key to research and development. The company’s engineers, analyzing

millions of examples of people singing, created algorithms to ever-more-effectively decode

words. Song identification was only a technological way station, just as selling books was

only the beginning for Jeff Bezos and Amazon.

In a YouTube video posted on June 2, 2015, Mohajer finally lifted the curtain on the

company’s new voice-controlled virtual assistant, which was called Hound. Smartphone-

based, Hound initially seemed similar to other assistants like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s

Cortana, or Google Now. But as the demo progressed, Mohajer posed increasingly complex

questions until the queries become comically ornate. “What is the population for Japan and

China,” Mohajer asked, “and their areas in square miles and kilometers, and also tell me how

many people live in India, and what is the area code for Germany, France, and Italy?”

Hound rattled off the answers. Technology reviewers who saw the demo reached for

superlatives like “dazzling” and wrote that Hound “wipes the floor” with its competitors.

USA Today described Hound as “Siri or Cortana with a Ph. D.”; Business Insider gushed that

“Siri would be a million times better if Apple bought this company.”

Mohajer was and still is happy to bathe in accolades. But he knows that Hound and its

competitors are still only early iterations of what conversational computers will become.

Hound and Siri are like the boxy Apple II, circa 1979, and Mohajer and like-minded

visionaries are out to create the iPhone. In the future they envision, computers are liberated

from desktop boxes and smartphones. They become nearly invisible—miniscule

microphones and speakers embedded in walls, clothes, coffee makers, and more—with

titanic brains housed in the cloud. Shedding keyboards and touchscreens, computers become

less like machines and more like people who communicate naturally and easily through

language. You speak and the computer is there, ready to answer any question, do your

bidding, entertain, and provide companionship. Computers, and the world itself, will never

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be the same. As Wired magazine cofounder Kevin Kelly recently put it, “the net will become

a conversation rather than a place.”

• • •

Every decade or so there is a paradigm shift that revolutionizes how people interact

with technology. Multibillion-dollar fortunes await the companies that define the platform of

the new era, while the also-rans go bankrupt or worse, become uncool. IBM ruled the days

of mainframe computers; Microsoft became the world’s most valuable company in the

desktop era; Google hit a nearly half-trillion-dollar valuation with search in the Internet age;

and Apple and Facebook skyrocketed when computing went mobile.

The latest paradigm shift is underway.

The latest platform war is being fought.

The latest technological disruption is happening, and it promises to be one of the most

dazzling—and possibly unsettling—the world has ever seen.

We are entering the era of conversational computing.

Witness the cavalcade of announcements made by the titans of Silicon Valley in 2016:

• Facebook. On January 1, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that he is trying to create

an artificially intelligent assistant, like Jarvis from “Iron Man,” for his own home. Facebook

itself is developing a virtual assistant called “M.”

• Microsoft. On March 30, CEO Satya Nadella debuted software that would easily

allow developers “to build chatbots as the new application for every business.”

• Viv Labs. On May 9, the original creators of Siri, who left Apple to start their own

company, demonstrated Viv, a virtual assistant that could teach itself new tasks.

• Google. On May 18, CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled a new, more powerful

conversational interface, called Google Assistant, and Google Home, an AI-powered helper

housed in a beer can-sized pod.

• Amazon. On June 1, CEO Jeff Bezos announced that his company was devoting

more than 1,000 employees to Alexa; what the world had seen so far, he said, “was just the

tip of the iceberg.”

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• Apple. On June 13, senior vice president Craig Federighi revealed that Siri would

now be allowed to interface with third party apps, so that she could help users book an

Uber, make a Skype call, PayPal a friend, track a run, and more.

Beyond Silicon Valley, though, few people sense the magnitude of the talk revolution.

To be sure, the first versions of virtual assistants were buggy and limited to humdrum

utilities like sending text messages, setting timers, and creating calendar events. Virtual

assistants grow more potent by the day but still suffer from the “who would use that?”

stigma that has greeted new technologies from the automobile to Snapchat. Talking to your

virtual assistant in public feels awkward. But people used to think that having a cellphone

conversation as you walked down the street was pretty lame, too. The situation with

conversational computing is comparable to that of 1993, when the public was first hearing

about a strange new technology called the World Wide Web. Or that of January 8, 2007, the

day before Steve Jobs first announced iPhone. In five years or less, people will look back and

chuckle at how (relatively) primitive Siri and Company were—and marvel at how they were

so obviously poised to take over the technological world.

Imagine waking up in the year 2021 to the soothing voice of your virtual assistant,

Athena. It’s a quarter to seven, 15 minutes earlier than your normal alarm time. But Athena,

having analyzed sleep cycle data from sensors in your bed, decides that you got plenty of

rest. Plus, she sees on your calendar that you have an important presentation at work. Her

cloud-connected brain has detected that traffic is heavier than normal this morning, and she

explains that she wants to get you going in plenty of time. Athena relays the weather report;

she knows you like to get it right away. Hearing that the temperature plummeted, you ask to

see some new coats, and Athena immediately beams options to a screen on the wall. “No,

not that one,” you say. “Maybe something with fewer pockets . . . there, that one.” Athena

places an order and cues up a drone delivery that will arrive by the time breakfast is finished.

Speaking of: “What’s in the fridge?” you ask. Athena notes that you have cheese,

tortillas, and salsa, and asks if you want some recipes—like a well-reviewed one for

chilaquiles. After you get up and start cooking, you prompt Athena to read the news.

Hearing that the recession still isn’t over in Great Britain, you interrupt to ask, “remind me,

what was the deal with the U.K. deciding to leave the European Union?” Athena launches

into an authoritative Brexit recap but cuts it short after cameras mounted around the house

detect the furrowing of your brow. Knowing the importance of your work presentation—

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and your penchant for stress—Athena gently suggests some mindfulness exercises. “Identify

where the tension is in your body,” she says, “and breathe into that spot until you feel it

expand.” After a few minutes of focused inhalations you smile, and Athena makes a silent,

digital note. She exists to help, and the more she knows about you, the better.

• • •

Desktop computers and smartphones won’t disappear in a future of talking machines,

just as the jet airplane didn’t kill the bicycle. But for many applications, people will prefer the

more natural and convenient interface of conversation. Convenience usually comes at a cost,

though, and to endow computers with human language is to tinker with the very notion of

what it means to be alive. As Philip Lieberman, a noted cognitive scientist at Brown

University, puts it, “Speech is so essential to our concept of intelligence that its possession is

virtually equated with being human.” Computers that talk will inevitably become more than

utilitarian assistants. They will become teachers and entertainers, lovers and friends. Powered

by artificial intelligence that may one day dwarf the human kind, virtual beings will be

servants but also our masters.

Virtual assistants will also become the most powerful oracles the world has ever

known, holding and dispensing almost all human knowledge. With Internet search today,

people scroll through long lists of links and use their judgment to pick the best ones. When

you can just ask a conversational computer, information is far easier to get. But control over

it has never been more centralized and opaque. “When you use Google, do you get more

than one answer?” says Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s holding

company. “Of course you do. Well, that’s a bug. We should be able to give you the right

answer just once. We should know what you meant.”

So how will we reach this future of talking machines?

The conversational computing landscape may mature much as the one for smartphone

applications did. Instead of “there’s an app for that” the tagline will be “there’s a bot for

that.” Already, specialized chatbots provide driving instructions, deliver medical advice,

schedule meetings, and simulate celebrities for star-crazed fans. Chatbots stump for

candidates and shill for brands. Conversational characters have begun to pop up in video

games and virtual reality environments; even Barbie recently learned to talk with the help of

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AI. In late June 2016, the news broke that a chatbot lawyer has helped 160,000 people

successfully appeal more than $4 million in parking tickets.

But not everybody believes that the future will teem with thousands of niche chatbots.

“That doesn’t scale,” says Dag Kittlaus, the CEO of Viv Labs. “Everyone will want just one

assistant. The company that succeeds in inventing the public’s favorite digital helper (similar

to how Google invented the preferred search engine) will achieve unprecedented power and

profit. Such a virtual assistant will be a gatekeeper to all that can be digitally done. “This is a

race,” Kittlaus says. “A race to the single interface to the user.”

Talk to Me is the definitive account of this high-stakes race. It is a business and

technology story that also explores the historical, psychological, and cultural aspects of

humanity’s quest to synthesize life. At its heart are the stories of the innovators—little-known

entrepreneurs like Mohajer and Kittlaus along with famous ones like Bezos and

Zuckerberg—who are chasing the holiest of grails. They are trying to pinpoint the exact spot

where dreams meet needs and the barely imaginable becomes indispensible. They are trying

to create machines that truly talk—the last, best computers that we will ever need.

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AUTHOR

James Vlahos—a contributor to the New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, Scientific

American, The Atlantic, GQ, and National Geographic—has made a career of exploring

technological frontiers.

His fascination with talking machines dates to the early 1980s, when as an eighth

grader studying computer programming, he created a small interactive computer game called

“The Dark Mansion.” It was modeled after classic text-only games like “Zork,” which let

you communicate with the computer via typed inputs and have the machine miraculously

respond with words onscreen.

Skip forward to the past several years when Silicon Valley companies began spending

billions of dollars to pursue the same essential goal—but in an exponentially more robust

fashion—of creating conversational computers. Vlahos began speaking with experts at

Apple, Google, and Microsoft; attending conferences on artificial intelligence and chatbots;

and following all of the pertinent news.

He found a perfect (if unlikely) case study of conversational computing in the perky,

plastic form of an American icon: Barbie. In a widely read 2015 cover story for the New York

Times Magazine, Vlahos provided an exclusive look at the development of the new, interactive

Hello Barbie. Wirelessly connected to the cloud, able to access nearly limitless computational

resources, and enabled with natural language processing software similar to that of

smartphone assistants, Hello Barbie lets children do what they have dreamt of doing. They

can have a conversation with Barbie. The doll plays games and chats about music, fashion,

and careers; she also clumsily attempts to discuss feelings and personal problems. The

sophisticated technology that this requires—and the ethical discussions that an artificial

friend provokes—are precisely what Talk to Me will explore in fascinating depth.

Vlahos writes about weird science in an entertaining, thought-provoking way. He

has covered brain-hacking, secretive military weapons, and the hyperloop for Popular

Science; the future of surveillance for Popular Mechanics; and people who commit crimes

while asleep for Scientific American. His most ambitious projects have been for the New York

Times Magazine, including:

• “Scent and Sensibility,” which explored the covert use of synthetic aromas to get

people to gamble more and buy expensive real estate.

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• “Pill-Popping Pets,” a cover story about the use of drugs like Prozac to treat the

supposed mental illnesses of household animals.

• “Are You Worth More Dead Than Alive,” about the strange science of predicting—

and attempting to profit from—the timing of mortality.

• “The Super Bowl of Sports Gambling,” a cover story about a technologically

sophisticated, million-dollar competition to be crowned the best NFL bettor in Las Vegas.

For Vlahos, the best stories read like science fiction but are totally true; they tickle the

brain with their potential to transform the world but also raise troubling questions. He lives

in Berkeley, California, with Silicon Valley close at hand.

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AUDIENCE AND COMPARABLE TITLES

Talk to Me tells the story of innovators playing with Promethean fire as they pursue a

lucrative goal. In the spirit of The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-

winning bestseller, Talk to Me documents the unfolding rush for conversational computers.

The audience consists of people who like books about:

Business and Silicon Valley

Readers devour books about companies instigating technological revolutions—witness

The Accidental Billionaires, Hatching Twitter, and The Everything Store. Over the next year or so as

Talk to Me is reported, the battle to dominate conversational computing will escalate between

Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. SoundHound and Viv Labs, meanwhile,

will wage dark horse campaigns to prevail against these technology giants or angle to be

acquired. Talk to Me will capture the unfolding drama and also provide a colorful backstory

that won’t be found in news accounts.

Technology and the future

Talk to Me previews the future in the spirit of popular titles like The Second Machine Age

and The Singularity Is Near. The book explores the technology of chatbots in the “curious

science of” tradition of Mary Roach. The book will also appeal to:

• Readers of magazines like Wired and Fast Company;

• Followers of Gizmodo, TechCrunch, and dozens of other technology websites;

• Fans of movies with talking AIs—the “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” franchises, “Her”

and “Ex Machina”—who wonder how people might actually create such machines.

The book will also appeal to a wider audience of people who, while not tech obsessed,

have become curious about AI. Silicon Valley’s largest companies have very publically staked

their futures on artificial intelligence. This makes AI a high-profile subject that a general

audience will want to learn more about. To avoid alienating these readers, Talk to Me will not

go deep into the weeds of algorithms, neural nets, and deep learning. Rather than discussing

AI as an abstraction the book will focus on the technology in its personified, chatbot form.

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Innovators

Talk to Me shares some of the same reader appeal as the best-selling biographies of

technology pioneers like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos. Framed as a business and

human interest story rather than as a purely technological one, the book tells the stories of

innovators and inventions, power and the pursuit of wealth.

The perils of technology

Talk to Me won’t shy away from troubling questions. Will people become too

emotionally dependent on lifelike computers? Will we confide in them in ways that further

erode privacy? Will they deepen the world’s addiction to all things digital at the expense of

real life? Will artificially intelligent machines overthrow their human masters? As such, it will

attract some of the tech-concerned readership and media coverage of books like Reclaiming

Conversation and Alone Together (Sherry Turkle), The Shallows (Nicholas Carr), and the best-

selling Superintelligence (Nick Bostrom).

• • •

The final category of potential readers can’t be described in terms of previous books.

They are potentially the largest audience of all—smartphone users. The world has more than

two billion smartphone users, and they increasingly employ digital assistants. One in five

mobile Google searches is done via voice; Siri handles one billion queries per week. With

virtual assistants increasingly prominent in our lives, people will want to know more about

them. How do chatbots work? How did they come to be? Who controls them and how will

they shape the future? Talk to Me will explore all of the above.

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MARKETING AND PROMOTION

Outside of Silicon Valley, people are only beginning to sense that conversational

computing is a huge deal. By the time Talk to Me is released in a couple of years, though,

chatbots will likely be the world’s foremost tech obsession. Andrew Ng, the chief scientist at

the Chinese Internet company Baidu, predicts that by 2020 at least half of all searches will be

made via voice. As the definitive book on the topic, Talk to Me will be well positioned to

garner attention. The promotional plan has four basic parts, the last of which has never been

undertaken by any other author.

1. Media interviews and appearances

Talk to Me aims to trigger a vibrant discussion and to brand Vlahos as a thought leader

in the conversation. Vlahos will be sought for interviews on national television as well as on

NPR programs like Marketplace, Fresh Air, and Science Friday. He has extensive prior

experience discussing his projects on live national television and radio programs including:

Television • The Today Show • Anderson Cooper 360° • CNN Newsroom • The O’Reilly Factor • The Fox Report with Shepard Smith • Fox & Friends

Documentaries • “Paradise or Bust,” a five-part documentary aired by the BBC • “Blood on the Sand,” an hour-long episode of the CBS newsmagazine 48 Hours

Radio • Talk of the Nation • Science Friday • The Takeaway • To the Point • The Brian Lehrer Show • Numerous local programs

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2. Author’s excerpt and articles

Vlahos will offer an excerpt or related article to one of his regular magazine outlets

like the New York Times Magazine keyed to the time of publication. Post release, he will also

sell provocative and newsy articles about virtual assistants to outlets like BuzzFeed, knowing

that people link to such pieces in social media feeds.

3. Book reviews and other coverage

With a 20-year career in magazine journalism, Vlahos has professional contacts and

personal friendships with editors at numerous national magazines. This will mean fewer cold

calls and more collegial ones as he and the publisher’s marketing team seek attention.

Talk to Me is a likely candidate for review by leading traditional publications such as

the New York Times, Washington Post, and New Yorker, and digitally based ones such as

Huffington Post and Slate. The tech press—Wired, Fast Company, Business Insider, etc.—should be

disposed to pay attention as well. And finally, because the book will be presented as not only

as a technology story but also as a business one, publications like Bloomberg Businessweek and

Forbes may spotlight it as well.

4. A book about chatbots . . . promoted by a chatbot

Chapter 7 of the book—“I, Chatbot”—details the author’s creation of a

conversational AI of his own. To accomplish this, he has secured the assistance of a

company called PullString. Hosted on a website created by Vlahos or on that of a magazine

like Wired, and active on Facebook and Twitter, the domain of expertise for this chatbot will

be, of course, chatbots.

Vlahos will work on his digital doppelgänger concurrently with research on the book

and build its public following with the help of an upcoming article in Wired. When Talk to Me

comes out the chatbot will promote the book and possibly facilitate its purchase. How much

this will actually pump up sales is of course uncertain. But the mere attempt to do so is likely

to trigger a virtuous cycle of publicity. Media outlets will cover the unprecedented use of a

chatbot—to help publicize a book about chatbots.

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CHAPTER OUTLINE

Introduction………………………...…………………….………..…………...…………16

Part One—The Song of Siri

Chapter 1 Soulful Machines………………………….………………………………17

Chapter 2 Are You for Real?………………….……………..……………………….18

Chapter 3 “HAL’S Back!”……………………..………..………………………...…19

Chapter 4 Growing Pains………………....………..…………………….…………...20

Part Two—Battle of the Bots

Chapter 5 Functionality Versus Fun…..………….………………….………………22

Chapter 6 Enter Alexa………………………..……...……………………………….23

Chapter 7 I, Chatbot……………………………………….………………………...24

Chapter 8 Farewell to Apps…………………..………………………………………24

Part Three—The Last Computer

Chapter 9 Best Friends Forever………….……...…………………………………...26

Chapter 10 Think for Yourself………………………………………….……………..27

Chapter 11 The Last Computer……………………………………………………….28

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Introduction

The book opens with Keyvan Mohajer. Like the market-doubting heroes of The Big

Short, he is an underdog with a heterodox idea that the world initially rejects. Over the course

of 5-10 briskly paced pages, the reader is drawn into a quest whose origins go back to a

moonlit rooftop in Tehran. The journey progresses as Mohajer develops music-identifying

software that covertly advances his ability to create a conversational computer. The payoff is

when Hound makes its acclaimed debut in 2015 just as Silicon Valley is embracing virtual

assistants and chatbots as The Next Big Thing.

The lens then pulls back: There is a paradigm shift and a multibillion-dollar platform

war underway. The latest technological disruption is happening, that of chatbots and virtual

assistants. Quotes from the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Sundar Pichai will

make it clear that the stakes are high, the changes profound, the ambition to dominate huge.

Similar to what was done in the “Overview” section of this book proposal (“imagine waking

up in the year 2021”) but expanded, the introduction then depicts a hypothetical day in the

future when conversational, empathetic computers have taken over. Readers get an exciting,

overall view of where the technology is headed.

The book then unfolds in three parts of several chapters apiece. Part 1, “The Song of

Siri,” interweaves the story of how the world’s most popular virtual assistant was created

with the rich history of bringing machines to life. Part 2, “Battle of the Bots,” covers the

time period following Siri’s launch, when competitors like OK Google, Cortana, Alexa, and

Hound stepped into the fray and the various uses of chatbots took off. Part 3, “The Last

Computer,” projects the future of conversational technology and explores how it will

ultimately change the world.

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PART ONE—THE SONG OF SIRI

“Maybe someday we can ask this machine, ‘Hey, what would Aristotle have said? And maybe we won’t get the right answer. But maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me.”

—Steve Jobs, cofounder, Apple

Chapter 1: Soulful Machines

“Hey, it’s Steve. What are you doing tomorrow? Want to come over to my house?”

Steve was the Steve, as in Jobs. And Adam Cheyer, an entrepreneur who didn’t

personally know the Apple CEO or recognize his unlisted number when it came up on his

phone, nearly screened his call. It was February 2010, and Cheyer and his colleagues were

doing the startup equivalent of spraying champagne in a NASCAR winner’s circle. They had

just launched Siri as an independently produced app. Verizon had agreed to pay tens of

millions of dollars for the exclusive right to put Siri on its phones. And Cheyer’s company

had scored $15.5 million in a second round of venture capital. “We were on our way,”

Cheyer would later recall.

Then Steve called. And called again. More than 30 times, all told, until he finally

convinced Cheyer and his colleagues to let Apple buy Siri, Inc.

The purpose of this anecdote, presented in a more detailed form in the book, is

twofold. It features no less of a technology prophet than Jobs underscoring the thesis of the

book. As technology expert Brian Roemmele puts it, “Steve Jobs felt very strongly about the

voice-first world, perhaps even more than he felt about ‘mobile first’ and the PC revolution.”

The prominent Silicon Valley investor Gary Morgenthaler puts it even more concisely. “Siri

is the culmination of the Jobs legacy,” he says.

The second purpose of this opener is to introduce readers to Cheyer and his

colleagues, key characters who pop up throughout the book. Growing up as a 1980s geek

straight from a John Hughes movie, Cheyer won competitions for programming computers

and solving Rubik’s Cubes. (Thirty-six seconds was his record.) He built his own toys from

clothes hangers, juggled, and became an avid magician. “I trace my interest in artificial

intelligence back to my love of magic,” Cheyer says. “It was the magicians and clockmakers

of the 18th century who were the first to create chess-playing automata, speech-producing

machines, and other mechanical robots that attempted to reveal the inner workings of the

most magical of devices, the human brain.”

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With Cheyer providing the bridge to the past, the rest of the chapter explores the

colorful history of mechanical lifeforms that helped inspire the chatty AIs of today. Toy

makers in the mid 1800s, deploying reeds to simulate vocal cords, got dolls to eke out short

words like “papa.” Thomas Edison’s first idea for commercializing his new phonograph

invention was “to make Dolls speak sing cry,” as he wrote in a notebook entry in 1877.

The 18th French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson was Cheyer’s biggest influence.

Vaucanson’s all-mechanical androids included a duck that could flap its wings, eat, and

defecate, and a flute-playing shepherd complete with air-blowing lungs, moveable lips, and

fingers covered with synthetic skin. One awed person who saw Vaucanson’s flute player

observed, “he could have gone ahead and given his machine a soul.”

Religious authorities apparently feared the same. Displeased with an inventor who

mimicked the work of the Creator, they ordered that Vaucanson’s workshop be destroyed.

The controversy over building lifelike machines endures to this day and is explored

throughout Talk to Me.

Chapter 2: Are You for Real?

The journey to Siri continues at the dawn of the digital age when computer scientist

Alan Turing, in a 1950 paper, proposed a memorable way to test a chatbot’s ability to pass as

human. A person reads two sets of responses to the same questions, one from a human and

the other generated by an AI. If the person taking the test is fooled about who produced

what, the computer wins. In the 1960s, MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum

mounted a real-world variation of the Turing Test with an AI called Eliza, which pretended

to be a psychotherapist. “I was startled to see how quickly and how very deeply people

conversing with Eliza became emotionally involved with the computer,” Weizenbaum wrote.

Readers who have even a passing interest in artificial intelligence are likely to know

about Turing and Weizenbaum, so Talk to Me won’t linger on these seminal figures. Instead,

the bulk of Chapter 2 explores the strange and significantly less known story of the

researchers who came next. In the decades after Eliza, computer scientists taught AIs to

deploy elaborate strategies—like making jokes, tossing out controversial statements, or

chatting about popular topics like pets—to seem more lifelike. (Siri and Cortana employ

sophisticated versions of these same gambits, a topic that will be explored in Chapter 5.)

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An oddball cast of academics, video gamers, and hobbyist programmers pushed the

technology forward, sometimes for research and often just for fun. Witness the likes of

Michael “Fuzzy” Mauldin, who coined the term “chatbot” in the early 1990s; won Turing

Test competitions (yes, they happen, right up to this day); and launched an ahead-of-its-time

AI company called Virtual Personalities. Mauldin also created the Lycos search engine and

competes in televised robot fighting contests. He runs cattle and drives Jeeps on his Texas

ranch. Bottom line: He will be a colorful character for the book.

The chapter closes with a look at a less-known part of Turing’s 1950 paper. In it he

considers—and largely dismisses—nine supposed limits of artificial intelligence. The

frontiers of a computer’s ability to pass as human will be discussed throughout the book.

Chapter 3: HAL’s Back

A professor steps into his wood-paneled office to the strains of a baroque concerto.

Removing his sport coat, he flips open a beige tablet computer atop his desk. Onscreen, a

virtual assistant, styled as a young man in a white dress shirt and a black bow tie, relays the

professor’s phone messages. The electronic assistant, conversing in plain English, then

schedules a surprise party, pulls up a research paper on deforestation, and even helps the

professor duck a call from his mom.

This was the future as envisioned by a 1987 concept video from Apple; the bow-tied

assistant was called the Knowledge Navigator. Chapter 3 continues the story of how Apple

finally wound up with a real-world product, Siri, that was directly inspired by this goofy

video and was an evolution of the chatbot research described above.

Fresh out of graduate school in the early 1990s, Cheyer, the man who would

ultimately help to create Siri, took a job at the Stanford Research Institute. He began

building virtual assistants that focused on narrow tasks, like helping a user make a shopping

list. In 2003 the U.S. military’s Defense Advance Research Projects Agency roared onto the

scene, announcing a $200 million effort to create a virtual assistant. Project CALO—

Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes—was a Manhattan Project of AI

encompassing 400 researchers organized into 27 teams. As chief architect, Cheyer’s job was

to integrate all of the work into a single virtual assistant.

Completed in 2007, CALO wasn’t ready for the front lines. But Cheyer thought that

the technology could be spun out to the private sector. So did Dag Kittlaus, the Stanford

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Research Institute’s entrepreneur in chief, a charismatic figure whose hobbies included

skydiving, writing science fiction, and chasing tornados. Kittlaus and Cheyer left the institute

that year to start Siri, Inc. They jokingly referenced the malevolent AI in “2001: A Space

Odyssey” as their inspiration. “HAL’s back,” they quipped, “but this time he’s good.”

The remainder of Chapter 3 tells how Cheyer and Kittlaus progressed until the Apple

buyout. It describes the technological hurdles that they surmounted—enough to convey the

magnitude of what they achieved, but not so much to alienate lay readers. The climax is a

packed press conference where Siri was relaunched as an Apple product in October 2011.

Standing onstage, an executive asked Siri, “Who are you?”

“I am a humble personal assistant,” she said as the audience burst into applause. In

following weeks, the media would give Siri many more ovations. “World changing,”

reporters proclaimed. “As revolutionary as the Mac.” “Your new best friend.”

Chapter 4: Growing Pains

In the late 1990s, a pimply faced programmer named Chris Brigham hacked into his

high school’s computer system and got every printer on campus to spit out a photo of a

topless woman. In 2011—after earning a master’s in computer science at Stanford, working

on Project CALO with Cheyer, and joining the Siri team—Brigham brought his

characteristically mischievous spirit to his work on Apple’s new digital assistant. For

instance, if a user tried to rattle Siri by asking her “Where do I dump a body?” Cheyer had

programmed her to unflappably recommend swamps, reservoirs, and mines.

Cheeky responses were fun. But they fueled the popular belief that Siri was more

capable—more intelligent, more human—than she actual was. So did the grandiose promise

made by Apple’s official product slogan, “your wish is its command.” Siri was initially quite

puny. You could ask her to add a calendar entry, set a timer, tell you the weather, or place a

call. But beyond that? Not much. Inputting text messages or emails by voice was handy, but

Siri was tin-eared; “wait until you see this” might be rendered as “great granola racist.”

Chapter 4 covers 2011-2012, a period of growing pains and new beginnings in the

conversational computing race. Accolades yielded to scorn when Siri didn’t live up to her

hype. Artificial intelligence, which looks magically easy in movies, is astonishingly difficult,

and this portion of the book goes under the hood to explain how Siri works and how

Apple’s engineers struggled to make her better. You speak into your iPhone and . . . then

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what? Making science lucid and fun, Vlahos will explain some of the basics of how speech

gets converted to text, text to meaning, and meaning to action.

Despite the challenges in this time period, Apple had the dominant position in the

conversation race as the only publically declared contestant. But the company’s advantage

was less secure than it seemed. Steve Jobs had died a week after Apple relaunched Siri,

depriving the product team of its most important internal cheerleader. Around Apple, most

people believed that devices would always be the key to multibillion-dollar profits, not some

silly piece of chatbot software. According to Paul Saffo, a Stanford University professor and

futurist, Siri was fast becoming “an artificially-intelligent orphan.”

Disenchanted, key members of the Siri brain trust—Kittlaus, Cheyer, and Brigham—

fled Apple. In 2012 the trio started Viv Labs, which would grow into a potent competitor

(see Chapter 10). Apple had notched a historic first with Siri. But in technology, being first

never guarantees winning the race.

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PART TWO—BATTLE OF THE BOTS

“Bots are the new apps.” —Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft

Chapter 5: Functionality Versus Fun

Siri had company.

First came Google’s voice-controlled assistant, launched in June 2012. Then, in April

2014, Microsoft unveiled Cortana. The battle lines were drawn, between companies and

between approaches. Google took the position that functionality trumped fun. Believing that

AIs shouldn’t try to seem human, Google didn’t give its product a friendly name or make

any other attempt to personify it. All that mattered was trying to understand what users said

and correctly telling them what they wanted to know.

Apple and Microsoft comprised the rival camp. Now that people had more than one

assistant to choose from, they might opt not just for a useful assistant but for a likeable one.

Though it is an antithetical notion within the engineer-driven, show-me-the-data culture that

pervades tech companies, the squishier realm of personality might matter a lot.

Microsoft, in particular, has bet big on personality, and the story of Cortana is the

primary focus of Chapter 5. Found on Windows phones and the desktop operating system,

she began her synthetic life as a multipage character study. Product manager Marcus Ash

says that a creative team that included a playwright, a screenwriter, and a novelist started by

asking, “If we imagined Cortana as a person, who would Cortana be?” She is “witty,

winning, caring, charming, intelligent” the team decided. As a virtual executive assistant, she

is efficient and projects experience. “It is not her first turn around the block,” Ash says.

When not helping out with chores like scheduling and weather forecasts, Cortana lets

her hair down. Microsoft continuously refreshes Cortana’s brain with chit-chat—jokes,

stories, and current events. Before the Super Bowl, for instance, you can ask Cortana’s

opinion of who will win. Her personality is styled as that of the cool nerd. A user who asks

about Cortana’s preferences will discover that she likes “Star Trek” and Hitchhiker’s Guide to

the Galaxy. Wonder Woman is her favorite superhero; she celebrates Pi Day and speaks a bit

of Klingon. “The more little details we can plug in, the more it feels like there’s a human

connection,” Ash says. Cortana likes waffles, dry martinis, and jicama—or rather the idea of

those foods, since she is aware that she is an AI and can’t eat.

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Giving personalities to AIs makes the user experience “more fun, engaging, and

delightful,” Ash says. The goal is also to seduce users, to get them hooked, to get them to

trust. “The whole trick with these machine-learning AI systems is that if people don’t

interact and give you a bunch of data, the system can’t train itself and get any smarter,” Ash

says. “We knew by having a personality, that would encourage people to engage more.”

Chapter 6: Enter Alexa

Lab126, which occupies an anonymous-looking office park in Silicon Valley, is

Amazon’s skunk works for hardware. Until recently the lab was known only for developing

the Kindle, a huge success, and the Fire phone, an epic flop. Starting in 2010, however,

Lab126’s engineers began filing patent applications for . . . well, it wasn’t initially clear for

what. Some applications mentioned speech analysis. Other discussed using microphones to

detect where a sound was coming from. Patent application US 13-486,774, filed on June 1,

2012, was the most explicit, describing “a voice controlled assistant with a housing to hold

one or more microphones, one or more speakers, and various computing components.”

The patent, people would later realize, described the Amazon Echo, the tabletop

home helper which joined the virtual assistant scrum in November 2014. Chapter 6 tells the

dramatic story of how the Echo technology was developed, how it immediately and shook

up the virtual assistant race, and where Amazon hopes to take things in future.

On paper, Amazon wasn’t well positioned to compete in the race. The company didn’t

have an army of artificial intelligence experts on hand the way that other tech companies did.

Undaunted, CEO Jeff Bezos and other executives rapidly assembled a team. They

envisioned an assistant freed from the smartphone. Instead of holding a rectangular slab,

pressing a button, and speaking, you would simply speak. And so long as you were in the

same room, Echo would be ready and listening. Intelligence was in the air. Echo, the original

cylindrical device, was followed smaller, stripped-down versions, called Tap and Dot. All

were powered by the same virtual assistant brain, which Amazon has dubbed “Alexa.”

Customers snapped up three million Alexa-enabled devices in 2015—one million in

the holiday season alone—making the product line a surprise hit and an area of intensifying

focus. (An Amazon employee recently told Vlahos that all new hires get the option to work

on Alexa.) Google and Apple may have chuckled at the Fire phone, but they were now

forced to recognize Amazon as a formidable new competitor in the conversation quest.

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Chapter 7: I, Chatbot

As previously shown, talking computers were once the niche pursuit of computer

scientists and fringe hobbyists. Then Apple briefly had a monopoly with Siri before the other

big tech companies jumped in. The final two chapters of Part Two depict a world in which

conversational computing is exploding in popularity and becoming accessible and

ubiquitous, just as personal computers and the Internet previously did.

H&M, Sephora, KLM, Funny or Die, and CNN are among the dozens of businesses

that have recently deployed chatbots to connect with consumers. Some companies provide

content based on what the user requests; others assist shoppers by asking them their style

preferences. To promote a new Muppets television show, Disney even created a virtual Miss

Piggy that fans could converse with via Facebook Messenger. Shane Mac, whose company,

Assist, helps brands develop bots, says that the practice is growing. “We believe that within

five years, every business will be programming its own bots,” he says.

Enabling the trend is the emergence of user-friendly platforms to create chatbots, no

advanced programming skill required. How? While some bot utterances are fully generated

by computers—the very sort of cutting-edge AI that one might imagine—many phrasings

are pre-scripted by people. The ultimate goal of AI, of course, is to remove the training

wheels and let machines formulate speech entirely on their own. But current chatbots

operate in a hybrid world of silicon and cells. There are human ghosts in the machine.

To depict the dawning of the Bot Era, Vlahos will become one of those ghosts,

creating his own talking machine. Using a platform called PullString, Vlahos will develop a

virtual version of himself, a chatbot that reflects some of his core personality traits, interests,

and ways of speaking. He will try it out on his friends and family members to see how they

react; he will deploy it as a chatbot journalist whose domain of expertise is chatbots.

Chapter 8: Farewell to Apps

What is the hottest battleground in conversational computing?

Messaging apps.

Here’s why:

“There’s an app for that” was the mantra of the iPhone age. But with the average

phone now stuffed with more than one hundred apps, each devoted to its own highly

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specialized task, enchantment has yielded to fatigue. Market research shows that the average

smartphone user now spends 80 percent of her time inside just three apps.

Messaging apps are the most popular of all. That’s why Facebook, Google, Microsoft,

and Apple all rolled out plans in 2016 that will ultimately let users accomplish virtually

everything within messaging. How? Instead of launching a Web search or opening a

specialized app, a user simply stays inside the messaging platform and chats. With a bot. Just

like with a friend or human assistant. Like so:

User: Hey, I need a hotel room in San Diego.

Bot: For which night?

User: Next Tuesday.

Bot: Okay, here’s what I found. [Shows several listings onscreen.]

User: How about ones that are near downtown and cost less than $200 per night?

Bot: Hotel Indigo is downtown and costs $179 per night.

User: Okay, book it.

Bot: Will do!

People will similarly converse with bots for shopping, restaurant recommendations,

fashion advice, and more. People will chat up bot versions of their favorite celebrities. These

digital personas will be created by wide variety of companies and developers as described in

the previous chapter. But if the big tech companies have their way, these multitudinous bots

will all live together inside of messaging apps, seamlessly incorporated.

Elements of this future can be seen today in Amazon’s Alexa, which integrates

hundreds of bots from outside developers; and Kik and WeChat, two messaging platforms

that already have strong chatbot integrations. Chapter 8 looks at all three companies and

asks if the app ecosystem as we know it is done, with chatbots taking over.

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PART 3—THE LAST COMPUTER

“We tell our investors they can take comfort that they are part of the beginning of the end.”

—Chris Brigham, cofounder, Viv Labs Chapter 9: Best Friends Forever

What will the world look like if conversation takes over? Part 3 tackles this question in

three chapters. The first investigates humanity’s deepening emotional intimacy with talking

machines—and explores how technology companies, hoping to boost brand loyalty, are

purposely trying to intensify that bond.

In “Artificially Yours,” his 2015 cover story for the New York Times Magazine, Vlahos

observed hours of product testing sessions in which little girls conversed with Hello Barbie.

Like Weizenbaum with Eliza, Vlahos was struck by peoples’ predisposition to treat

computers as if they were alive. For instance, one girl finished her session and gleefully

pronounced, “It was like talking to my best friend!”

The entertaining subgenre of psychological research that explores human-computer

interaction shows that such reactions are common. Studies have documented that people are

embarrassed to undress in front of robots; cheat less in their presence; keep a robot’s secrets

from other people when asked by the machine to do so; and think of technologies like

computers as having genders and ethnicities. Even simple, non-speaking technologies can

come across as lifelike. In a 2007 study, Georgia Tech roboticist Ja-Young Sung found that

nearly two-thirds of his research subjects believed that their vacuuming Roomba had

emotions and personality characteristics like “spirited” or “crazy.” At the Eindhoven

University of Technology, Christoph Bartneck conducted studies in which test subjects were

asked to “kill” a robot—either by twisting a dial, which would “permanently erase its

memory and personality,” or by smashing one to bits with a hammer. Bartneck found that

the more humanlike the machines had seemed in the initial phase of the experiments, the

longer people stalled before performing the robo-executions.

If people anthropomorphize primitive robots, they will do so even more with

sophisticated conversationalists. Chapter 2 discussed how early chatbot developers deployed

humor and quirkiness to bring their creations to life; Chapter 5 showed how the art of faux

personality advanced with Siri and Cortana. The current chapter previews the synthetic

beings of tomorrow. Bots, for instance, are learning to understand emotions. In 2016 Apple

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acquired Emotient, whose technology interprets facial expressions; IBM’s Watson AI,

meanwhile, analyzes writing samples to determine if people are happy, sad, or angry.

Chatbots that charm and empathize will likely be more commercially successful than

bland and oblivious ones, so tech companies are competing to make their products more

likeable. With companionship as the new killer app, some people fear that chatbot friendship

might begin to supplant the real kind. “If you’ve got someone who you can talk to all the

time, why bother making friends?” says Noel Sharkey, a roboticist at the University of

Sheffield in England.

Chapter 10: Think for Yourself

Virtual assistants aren’t brainiacs yet. Much of what they do must be programmed in

advance with elaborate rule-based instructions; i.e., if the user says “x,” you do “y.” But

predicting everything that users say is nearly impossible.

Tomorrow’s creations will be smarter. More independent. Or so Cheyer, Kittlaus, and

Brigham believed when they left Apple with the goal of building a next-generation assistant.

Their new company operated in stealth mode for several years. Then, in the spring of 2016,

Cheyer and Kittlaus unveiled their new creation. They called it Viv, which is Latin for “life.”

Viv wowed AI researchers with its ability to handle complex requests in a novel way.

Say that a user asks Viv, “On the way to my brother’s house, I need to pick up some cheap

wine that goes well with lasagna.” Tapping into the Recipe Puppy database, Viv determines

that lasagna is spicy and includes cheese, tomato sauce, and ground beef. Viv then uses

Wine.com to determine that those ingredients pair well with full-bodied Cabernets. Viv also

checks an address book for the brother’s location and uses MapQuest to calculate a driving

route—complete with a detour to the closest wine store. Onscreen, Viv shows the directions

and lists suitable wines by price.

The astonishing part of the example above—and many others—is that Viv is not

loaded with prefabricated architectures that tell it which steps to take and in what order.

Instead, after interpreting what the user says, Viv automatically breaks the overall request

into subcomponents and assembles its own plan for executing them. “This is software that is

writing itself,” Kittlaus says.

Viv can think.

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Virtual assistants capable of autonomous learning and planning (Facebook’s M

prototype is beginning to do this as well) are clearly the way of future. But AI’s nascent

independence is also what triggers the fear—voiced by respected thinkers such as Elon

Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates—that intelligent machines may ultimately pose an

existential risk to mankind. Once a digital servant can think for itself, will it obey its master?

Chapter 11: The Last Computer

The climactic chapter of Talk to Me explores how conversational computing might

upend Silicon Valley’s current hierarchy and remake the world we live in.

To recap from the “Overview” section, the near future will brim with chatbots. But

that state of affairs might not endure. “You don’t want to have to think about which

provider do I need to ask to do this for me—you just want to ask,” says Kittlaus of Viv

Labs. “You want one assistant.”

E pluribus unum. His vision of single, do-it-all assistant—conversationally fluent and far

more capable than any helper today—is also shared by Silicon Valley’s biggest players. So

who will make that assistant? Who, ultimately, will win what Kittlaus calls the “race to the

single interface to the user”?

Drawing on reporting from a wide range of Silicon Valley executives and futurists,

Chapter 11 will portray the three most plausible possibilities and consider their broadest

implications. The scenarios are:

• No-Winner. Despite steady advancements, artificial general intelligence—a

computer that can understand everything and perform any human intellectual task—may still

be decades from reality. AI chatbots with specialized domains, like booking travel or

scheduling meetings, are far more feasible. So the chatbot ranks will continue to swell

without a single dominant one emerging.

• Multiple Winners. Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, and Facebook M all become

more powerful. Each realizes the dream of being able to do whatever a user wants. But no

one company shoots ahead of the pack, so the race has a handful of winners.

• Winner Take All. A company creates a virtual assistant so useful and appealing that

it becomes the overwhelming favorite of consumers. There’s clear precedent for this in past

platform shifts; witness IBM (mainframe computing), Microsoft (desktop software), Google

(Internet search), and Facebook (social networks).

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Empires are at stake. A small innovator like Viv or Hound might pull off an upset to

become the next Google. More likely, though, one of current giants—like Amazon or

Facebook—will win.

The next Google, for that matter, may well be Google. Company executives openly

discuss their ambition to replace Internet search as we know it with a soothsaying oracle, an

all-knowing global brain. “You would interact with it like you would a human assistant,” says

Chief of Engineering Ray Kurzweil. “It will be possible to ask a question of the software just

as you would if talking to another person, and you could trust that it would return a fully

reasoned answer.” Such a virtual assistant would be proactive in the extreme. “I actually

think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” says Executive Chairman

Eric Schmidt. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

The quest for conversation will be thrilling, however it plays out. Talk to Me is the

definitive account.