Expansion of AI Territory
On October 6, Samsung Electronics announced that it took over VIV Labs founded by former core Siri developers who developed the voice recognition service at Apple. This acquisition has enabled Samsung Electronics to significantly enhance current services such as S Voice and secure core capabilities to build intelligence services in the short term.
The VIV’s AI platform lets outside service providers freely participate and connect their services to an AI interface based on natural languages. This means that unlike closed Srii, VIV stressed openness. Service providers that do not have AI technology are able to hook up their services to VIV’s platform. Services connected to VIV organically provide services by analyzing users’ intentions. VIV can execute more complicated and various orders by organically compounding services connected in this manner according to users’ orders at one go. On top of that, VIV will be able to provide more personalized services as its platform evolves with an increase in service use.
Samsung Electronics expects the takeover of VIV to be a big helping hand for the company due to its “Phone Plus” strategy to apply AI to the platforms of various advanced devices, in particular, smartphones. It is said that the Korean smartphone giant will launch a smartphone loaded with the VIV platform in the second half of next year. It is highly likely that Samsung Electronics will introduce this platform to the next model of the Galaxy Note 7. But it was not yet decided whether or not the company will maintain the name of VIV or integrate it into S Voice. In the mid- to long-term, Samsung Electronics will be able to apply VIV’s technology to various home electronics products such as refrigerators, washing machines and air conditioners.
Samsung Electronics has been steadily taking over and investing in various companies with IT technology since 2014. VIV is the fourth company that Samsung Electronics took over in recent two years. Earlier, Samsung Electronics took over SmartSync, an IoT platform company, LoopPay, a simplified payment service firm and Joyent, a cloud service provider in that order. It has been known that Samsung Electronics began to push forward with the takeover of VIV on a full scale early this year on instructions from Lee Jae-yong, vice chairman of Samsung Electronics.