After Leading Development of Bixby AI Voice Assistant
Larry Heck, who led the development of Samsung Electronics’ artificial intelligence (AI) voice assistant Bixby, has recently left the company. Heck was one of the world-class experts that Samsung Electronics had recruited from 2017 to 2019 to expand its new businesses, including AI, big data, and robots. Until recently, Heck has been in charge of the Bixby business at a U.S. subsidiary of Samsung Electronics.
Heck quit Samsung Electronics in April and will move to his alma mater, Georgia University of Technology, as a professor next month.
Heck is an authority in machine learning and natural language (voice and text language) processing. After earning a doctorate in electrical engineering from Georgia University, he served as vice president of R&D at Nuance Communications, a U.S. software company, from 1998 to 2005. He developed early AI technologies, including natural language processing, speech recognition, and text to speech conversion solutions.
Then, Heck led the R&D department at Yahoo and played a leading role in introducing AI services to search functions. In 2009, he joined Microsoft and was involved in developing "Cortana," a personal secretary for voice recognition, and moved to Google in 2014 to lead the development of Google Assistant.
Heck joined Samsung Electronics as a senior vice president of Samsung Research America (SRA) in November 2017. He concurrently headed up the Silicon Valley Center in the U.S. and Toronto Center in Canada, and conducted advanced research on next-generation Bixby including user interaction for human-like communication based on voice and visual recognitions and developer tools for AI research and development.
After April 2019, Heck served as CEO of Viv Labs, which was founded by developers of Apple's voice assistant service "Siri." Samsung acquired Viv Labs in October 2016 to strengthen its AI platform. Viv Labs was merged into SRA to efficiently develop Bixby technology in March this year, and Heck had been in charge of the Bixby business at Samsung’s U.S. subsidiary since the merger.
Meanwhile, Indian-born senior vice president Pranav Mistri, who orchestrated the artificial human project Neon at Samsung Electronics, has also recently left the company. In November 2009, Mistri disclosed his idea of "sixth sense," which he had been studying while doing his doctorate study at MIT Media Lab, in a TED presentation, earning fame as a genius scientist. Mistri joined Samsung Electronics in 2012. In 2017, he was promoted to senior vice president. Since then, he had served as head of innovation at Samsung Electronics' Mobile Division until October 2019. Mistri proposed a new model of Galaxy Gear and led the development of UXs for 360-degree 3D imaging cameras.