Philip Houska Samsung is also starting to make inroads into the ever-expanding segment of various voice assistants and artificial intelligence. For an as yet unknown financial sum, he negotiated the acquisition of the Viv service, which is part of the team behind the Siri voice assistant. Its functional equipment will probably be implemented in products from Samsung with the aim of competing with well-established systems such as Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant or Alexa.
Although Viv may seem like a lesser-known service, it has quite a successful history behind it. The company was founded by the people who were behind the birth of the Apple assistant Siri. It was bought by Apple in 2010, and two years later a similar team formed a partnership with Vive.
The main benefit of Vivo at the time (before even Siri in iOS 10 began to adapt) was the support of third-party applications. For this reason as well, Vív should have been more capable than Siri. Furthermore, it is also designed precisely for the needs of a "smart shoe". According to one of the founders, Siri was never intended for this purpose.
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This system based on artificial intelligence definitely has potential, or rather it certainly had before the purchase from Samsung, which is not yet clear how they will handle it. Even Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook, or Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, saw a future in Viv, who gave Viv a financial injection. It was expected that Facebook or Google might try to buy Viv, as well as Apple, which would certainly benefit from further improvements to Siri. But in the end, Samsung succeeded.
The South Korean company would like to deploy elements of artificial intelligence in its devices by the end of next year at the latest. “This is an acquisition that was negotiated by the mobile team, but we also see interest across devices. From our perspective and the customer's perspective, the interest and power is to get the most out of this service across all products," said Samsung Senior Vice President Jacopo Lenzi.
Together with Vive, Samsung has a chance to compete with other intelligent systems, which include not only Siri, but also Assistant from Google, Cortana from Microsoft or the Alexa service from Amazon.
Doesn't Android have some conditions such that no other voice assistant than Google Now (or whatever it's called) can be set up?