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Samsung announced on Wednesday that it acquired AI company Viv Labs, the team behind Apple's Siri, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports.
While specific details about the acquisition have not been revealed, the company's virtual assistant, dubbed Viv, is expected to be integrated into Samsung’s existing connected devices — most prominently its smartphones — while remaining separate from Samsung. The acquisition will help both platforms become more competitive against existing operating systems (OSs) and their virtual assistants, such as Siri, Google Assistant, and Microsoft’s Cortana.
The acquisition helps Samsung on a number of fronts:
- It helps Samsung stay relevant within the smartphone market. During its Made by Google event on Tuesday, Google revealed that its Google Assistant would not be included in Android 7 updates. This leaves Samsung without a device-integrated AI component, a feature that's rapidly becoming part and parcel of smartphones.
- It bolsters Samsung’s software. Samsung is adding more and more features to its software so it can better compete with other OSs, notes WSJ. In 2015, the companybought mobile payments startup LoopPay in order to launch Samsung Pay, a mobile payments system similar to Apple Pay and Android Pay. Adding its own virtual assistant is just another piece of that puzzle.
- It furthers Samsung’s efforts in building Tizen OS into a competitive platform. Viv will likely become the primary interface that connects Samsung’s widely varied device portfolio, which spans smartphones, connected TVs, smartwatches, and its home hub. Adding Viv also means that Samsung controls even more of what’s running on its flagship smartphones, making it less reliant on Android. This is essential for Tizen OS to become comparable to other major platforms.
Samsung’s massive market share gives Viv the perfect launching point to reach ubiquity, according to Viv co-founder Dag Kittlaus. Samsung’s unrivaled smartphone shipments, in particular, are advantageous for the AI. That’s because AI relies on massive amounts of constantly updated user data. At the moment, smartphones provide the most prolific user data. The acquisition will give the Viv plenty of room to grow its data banks, making it increasingly more powerful and, soon, competitive with existing AI platforms.
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