Intel Capital, the venture arm of Intel, boasts over 120 portfolio companies to have listed publicly on the NASDAQ alone. In celebration of that, President Arvind Sodhani rang yesterday’s closing bell, and we caught up with him to chat about the future of the Ultrabook platform, wearable computing, and advancements in voice and gesture technology.
Intel Capital has actually invested in two of our most recent Disrupt alumni, Ark and Expect Labs, which focuses on predictive voice transcription to help you out as a digital assistant while you’re on the phone.
Sodhani hinted quite strongly that Expect Labs could potentially be the company to bring voice support to the Ultrabook platform, a promise Intel made in October of 2012.
“Our platforms, ultrabooks, tablets and laptops, will have a digital personal assistant on them in the next several years,” said Sodhani. “They’ll anticipate what you want to do next, what you need, and they’ll be context-aware.”
“Expect Labs fits into that very nicely,” said Sodhani. He also mentioned that Intel is looking at other companies for both speech and gesture recognition, but Expect Labs is clearly in the running.
Along with the rapid expansion of the cloud, Sodhani believes that 2012’s onslaught of voice-powered technology will only continue to grow alongside gesture-recognition technology.
As will wearables. Though Intel Capital hasn’t yet invested in wearable computing hardware, Sodhani admits that they’re certainly open to it should the right opportunity arise.