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I'm amazed that the founders didn't have some sort of non-compete agreement here.

Excited that it's a more extensible digital assistant though. I think the reason why I like Alexa the most out of the services right now is that it feels like the easiest to add new functionality too. Hopefully this will pave the way for more open ai assistants.

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California doesn't believe in non-competes. The state believes that competition is in the public interest and enforcing non-competes would be counter to that.

That's not true. California enforces non-compete related to the sale of a company (section 16601 - http://law.onecle.com/california/business/16601.html).

But what about patents?

Federal law.

A lot of the Siri IP belonged to Stanford SRI and Siri was basically licensing it. So when Adam left Siri and started Viv, Apple couldn't do anything. Also note that, Viv rarely talked about any details of their technology. Probably they were slightly afraid. At the same time Apple didn't want to pick a fight with a small startup and damage it's reputation. It might change now that Samsung is the owner.

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