In a series of posts analyzing what is happening in the digital assistant platform race, this post discusses Samsung digital assistants. A personal digital assistant race would not be complete without a mention of Samsung, the other giant in the consumer home and personal mobile devices. Samsung had Bixby, its own virtual digital assistant platform when they acquired Viv Labs in October of last year. Viv Labs was founded by the Siri founders who had left Apple to pursue their dream for a universal digital assistant platform and open to developers to create plug-ins for the platform. They had been working on the new digital assistant for four years when Samsung acquired them. Samsung must not have had much confidence in Bixby and appeared to have bought on the idea that Viv would found its way into all Samsung devices. So, it was a surprise when Samsung announced the Galaxy S8 earlier this year and the digital assistant shipped with the device was based on their original Bixby. Public statements still indicate that Samsung has big plans for Viv and they may be just taking the time to bring it to market at the right time, in most if not all Samsung devices. The irony is that Viv Labs founders left Apple because they wanted to create a universal personal digital assistant, however, by joining Samsung one can easily predict that Samsung will want to use Viv to sell more of its devices, just like Apple did.
As far as the technology, from the demo I have seen, the most impressive thing is that Viv can generate conversational dialog code entirely automatically, easing the inefficient task and challenge to teach a digital assistant. It that works they will definitively be at the forefront of the digital assistant technology race provided their NLP becomes as good as Google’s. Viv Labs videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=016w517R1Hw - Apr 10, 2017 (CTO, Adam Cheyer) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rblb3sptgpQ - May 9, 2016 (CEO, Dag Kittlaus) Conclusions: Will we one day have one digital assistant that will be far superior to the others? While Google seems to have the edge as the better AI and NLP platform today, it’s fair to say that Viv has potential, but it’s an unknown at this point. We may end up with four or five digital assistants entrenched within their respective company’s products, and their success will be dependent on the success of the products they will run on. Comments are closed.
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