DAG KITTLAUS

Published by Daniel at December 22, 2023

Founder and mind behind several history-defining contributions to the telecommunication and AI industry, Dag Kittlaus is a well-known innovator whose ideas and insightful knowledge have made everyday life easier worldwide...

Dag Kittlaus is an American-Norwegian AI Entrepreneur, most known for being the co-founder and CEO of two of the most iconic digital personal assistant companies, Siri and Viv. He was born in 1967 in Palos Heights – IL, to a Chicagoan father and a Norwegian mother. During his childhood, he moved to Michigan, where he graduated from Elston High School in 1985. Four years later, in 1989, he received his BA in economics at Indiana University Bloomington, and subsequently, he decided to move to Norway, where he lived with his aunt and uncle. There, he studied at BI Norwegian Business School, earning his MBA in 1994.In the same year, his tech journey began when he read an article on an airplane and became obsessed with learning about Internet Protocol. (1,2)

In Norway,Kittlaus started his mobile phone industry involvement, working at Telenor Mobile for almost three years in mobile applications. He became the Vice President of the company in 2000, where he oversaw several projects, including developing the first dynamic mobile home screen in the world. (1,2)

Building a strong bridge in telecommunications.

Two years later, Kittlaus left the company in 2002 to begin working as Motorola’s General Manager. During this time, he led the xProducts Multimedia Product Group and joined ventures with Google, Android, and Yahoo. He also brought many innovative solutions and developed the Screen3 mobile app, a project currently used by millions of users and was adopted by Cingular, China Mobile, and Telefonica.(3,4)

Finally! A beautiful victory.

Besides his passion for telecommunication, some of the areas that this entrepreneur is invested in are speech recognition technology and machine learning. In 2007, Kittlaus and his friends Adam Cheyer, an AI pioneer and engineer, and Tom Gruber, an expert in Semantic Web, were doing extensive work at Stanford Research Institute AI Center. The group studied different natural language interface approaches, convolutional neural networks, and long short-term memory. Finally, Siri was born after two years of gathering information about the perfect AI and finding solutions to the limitations that Kittlaus encountered in his two previous jobs. They constructed their own local search engine comprising personal and confidential data and tried at least 50 versions of this technology. The name Siri means in Norwegian “beautiful victory”. (5,6,7)

Finally, Siri was born after two years of gathering information about the perfect AI and finding solutions to the limitations that Kittlaus encountered in his two previous jobs. They constructed their own local search engine comprising personal and confidential data and tried at least 50 versions of this technology. The name Siri means in Norwegian “beautiful victory”.(5,6,7)

Biting the Apple.

Siri’s speech recognition engine was built by Nuance Communications, an American computer software company, and counted three main components: Conversational interface, Service Delegation, Personal Context Awareness, and numerous pre-programmed responses. In 2010, Steve Jobs became interested in this innovative project. While it took multiple offers from Jobs for the team to sell their creation, Apple finally acquired Siri after two months of negotiations and added the three co-founders as new company members. Dag Kittlaus became the Director of iPhone Apps, focusing on Siri and speech recognition teams in iOS. He developed a slightly different version from the original for the company, and after two years, he left Apple.(8)

While it took multiple offers from Jobs for the team to sell their creation, Apple finally acquired Siri after two months of negotiations and added the three co-founders as new company members. Dag Kittlaus became the Director of iPhone Apps, focusing on Siri and speech recognition teams in iOS. He developed a slightly different version from the original for the company, and after two years, he left Apple.(8)

A more powerful “Global Brain”.

After Kittlaus and Cheyer decided to leave Apple, they embarked on another joint project. They co-founded Viv Labs, an AI assistant company that had the main goal to offer a platform that would open AI to everyone and enable them to “talk to everything.” Viv – The Global Brain – acted as a powerful conversational interface without limits that could accomplish any task. Kittlaus focused on advanced AI systems that automatically write their own code, and Viv’s main difference from Siri was its openness to third-party developers. They could use any kind of AI interface and later launch them “into a giant, global brain” worldwide. Samsung bought the company in 2016, and Kittlaus became Vice President of Samsung for the next three years.(1,2,3)

Taking control every day.

While both of Dag Kittlaus’ most known creations can be used to support healthcare delivery, his most recent project, Riva Health, is deeply involved in delivering modern medicine. Co-founded by Dr. Tuhin Sinha in 2019, Riva offers a novel mobile cardiology app that provides real-time BP data to help remote patient management and rapid results sent to doctors. The app focuses on blood pressure and working with FDA marketing clearance, but they plan to broaden the scope beyond heart health.(10)

Unwavering commitment.

Kittlaus’s unwavering dedication to technology didn’t stop even after receiving unfortunate news. A few months after stepping into Samsung, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he became a cancer survivor while continuing to work as Vice president, CEO, and Speakers.(11)