“Samsung Electronics Co. is acquiring Viv Labs Inc., a U.S.-based artificial-intelligence software company, seeking to bolster its expertise as smartphones become virtual assistants for complex tasks,” Jungah Lee reports for Bloomberg.
“The developers behind Viv also founded Siri, which was sold to Apple Inc. and became the voice-based digital assistant on iPhones and other gadgets. Viv has been working on an AI platform that understands plain language so that users can interact with computers and software programs,” Lee reports. “A Viv-based digital assistant will first appear on Samsung’s smartphones due out later next year, according to Rhee In-jong, executive vice president at Samsung.”
MacDailyNews Take: “Hey Viv, where’s the fire extinguisher?!”
Lee reports, “Viv, based in San Jose, California, would have been an attractive target for any other company looking for AI expertise, such as Google parent Alphabet Inc. or Microsoft Corp.”
MacDailyNews Take: Apple didn’t want Viv. Or they’d have it. The same goes for Google and Microsoft.
Lee reports, “Viv was designed as a software platform that other programmers could use to build conversational features into their products.”
MacDailyNews Take: https://developer.apple.com/sirikit/
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This is the equivalent of buying Royal Crown Cola in order to try to compete with Amazon’s Dr. Pepper, Google’s Pepsi, and Apple’s Coke.
It’s a wannabe of a wannabe of a wannabe of Siri.
Viv has been trying to sell themselves for quite some time now. They finally settled for Samsung.
With SiriKit, Apple already has what Viv is trying to be.
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Apple’s Siri digital assistant made Cortana look bad at WWDC – June 14, 2016