Samsung may have suffered quite a blow with its exploding smartphones. So, it has decided to enter new territory to win back the lost fans.
It has announced that it will be introducing its own artificially-intelligent smart assistant, a la Google Assistant or Siri, as part of its Galaxy S8 series available from next year. Why not, given Apple, Microsoft, Google, and even Amazon now have one? Plus, Samsung needs to make up the over-$5.4-billion loss it expects to endure till mid-2017, according to Reuters, thanks to the withdrawal of the inflammable S7 phones.
Samsung's Siri killer to debut on the Galaxy S8 >https://t.co/oZ5k8cWtwu
— David Papp (@DavidPapp) >November 7, 2016
Samsung’s assistant will be device-agnostic, which would make it work across home appliances and wearable devices too, and have seamless integration with third-party services, according to reports. This might give Samsung’s TVs, washing machines, refrigerators that edge in the home appliances market too.
Back in October this year, the South-Korean electronics firm had announced a takeover of Viv Labs Inc., a San-Jose-based stealth startup focussed on AI development comprised of engineers who created Siri. Viv hopes to be a superior parser of user’s queries and provide optimal answers by generating algorithms integrated from several third-party developers.
The firm has gone in for a collaborative-technology model, whereby, according to Samsung VP Rhee Injong, “Developers can attach and upload services to our agent. Even if Samsung doesn’t do anything on its own, the more services that get attached the smarter this agent will get, learn more new services and provide them to end-users with ease.”
Samsung’s hope is that its brand-new AI tech will surpass Apple’s and Google’s with a voice-assistant that is a lot more interactive and intelligent. After Google introduced its own assistant in the Pixel series, Samsung faced a new rival in the smartphone arena.
The S8 is likely to be released at the Mobile World Congress 2017 event in February 2017.
