Samsung’s future is into AI, and now we have confirmation
Confirmation? Yes, because Tizen Experts saw it coming one month ago, depicting Samsung’s strategy with great precision. But we are sure this won’t come as a surprise to our readers.
That, according to Reuters, Samsung is going to exploit its recent acquisition of VIV already in early 2017, when it’s expected to launch Samsung S8 – in February, eventually March if we are to believe TrustedReviews.
About a month ago, Samsung acquired VIV for an undisclosed amount. Previously funded with $30M in 3 rounds, the 4-years old San Jose-based startup describes its mission as “Viv radically simplifies the world by providing an intelligent interface to everything.” What the company means for “simplifying the world” and “intelligent interface” is actually layman’s terms for the paradigm shift that’s occurring, from graphical interfaces to conversational interfaces. As Tony Aube has perfectly summarized, no UI is the new UI. We’re moving from a highly-sophisticated, interaction-full interface towards a world where we’ll only need our voice to command orders to a super clever AI slave.
After all, this is nothing but the ultimate celebration of Invisible Design, which has been around since at least 2013.
Samsung plans to deploy the conversational AI that VIV is developing into its entire family of products. Founded by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham – who also created Siri, acquired by Cupertino six years ago – VIV came to life in 2012 on the long wave of the Apple’s acquisition. The focus, as declared by Samsung Electronics’ Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong in a meeting with VIV Labs is on user experience and convenience.
Also, Samsung Electronics’ Vice President Rhee Injong added, in the occasion of a presentation to reporters, that we are talking about an open AI platform.
“The current Galaxy smartphones need separate applications for users, for instance, to order pizza or coffee” he explained “but the new AI platform will enable them to order (or do) things directly without going through separate applications”.
Many news outlets are talking about an upgraded version of S Voice, but in my opinion it’s unlikely that Samsung is only cooking a Siri / Google Now competitor. It’s way more probably that, in Samsung’s vision for its near future, there is something more in the likes of Google Assistant which, as everyone knows, will be the living soul of Google’s Pixel and Google Home. The other great thing is that all this innovation should see its way into Tizen smartphones, TV, IoT, smarthome, and more devices we haven’t even heard of 🙂
Samsung owns SmartThings, you remember?
Related News
