After birthing a virtual assistant that knows a little of everything, SRI International is working on ones that know a lot about just one thing.

The nonprofit research center is arguably best known in the tech world for spinning off Siri, whose virtual assistant tech Apple acquired in 2010. SRI also incubated Tempo, an AI-driven calendar app that Salesforce bought last year.

Now, SRI believes it can infuse AI into even more settings–shopping, banking, travel, business-to-business applications, and so on–allowing for deeply knowledgeable chatbots that know how to carry a conversation. The goal, says William Mark, SRI’s president of information and computing services, is to have assistants that are much better at specific tasks than a general-interest assistant like Siri.

“If you were to say to Siri, ‘transfer $200 from savings to checking,’ or something like that, Siri would just look something up on the web about transfers,” Mark says. “That’s not a critique of Siri, it’s just that Siri doesn’t know anything about banking.”

William Mark

The specifics of SRI’s efforts are still murky, but in 2014 the group spun off a startup called Kasisto, which recently launched personal banking bots for Facebook Messenger, Slack, and text messaging. A separate Kasisto bot will soon be able help people keep track of their investments.

Mark says this is just the beginning, as SRI is planning for more spin-offs in the near future. The goal is to establish a platform for companies to build their own highly specialized assistants. SRI’s tech will provide the conversational “scaffolding,” while each industry provides the knowledge.

As an example, Mark says, imagine you’ve asked a bank teller to transfer some funds, and the teller asks whether to transfer from checking or savings. You might respond by asking, “How much do I have in savings?” To a human teller, that’s an understandable branch of the main conversation. But to a chatbot, it might seem like you’ve changed the subject. SRI’s framework will supposedly be able to handle these kinds of conversational moves.