Samsung’s mobile business may have taken a hit in recent months due to the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco, but the South Korean tech giant still has many other profitable ventures to grow while its smartphone division recuperates. Internet of Things (IoT) has been one of the company’s main focus points in recent years, and that isn’t about to change anytime soon. In fact, Samsung just announced that it’s planning a major evolution of its existing IoT products following the acquisition of a US artificial intelligence (AI) startup Viv Labs. As revealed by the company’s representatives earlier today, Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong and Viv Labs’ executives recently had a meeting with the goal of figuring out a way to integrate Viv Labs’ technology with future Samsung products.
While the focus of the meeting was integrating Viv Labs’ solutions with IoT devices, the parties also discussed ennobling Samsung’s smartphones with newly acquired technology. In addition to that, the head of the company’s R&D branch Rhee In-jong revealed that the upcoming Galaxy S8 will be Samsung’s first flagship featuring voice-controlled AI technology. More specifically, this feature will also be based on Viv Labs’ existing technology. For those unfamiliar, Viv Labs was founded by several programmers and engineers who worked on the Siri voice assistant.
The US startup is currently focused on wrapping up work on its AI-powered platform which allows users to control their home appliances by issuing voice commands to their smartphones. The company boasts that their current technology can understand approximately 95% of all issued comments and can even understand contextual orders. While the Galaxy S8 and the Galaxy S8 Edge will be the first two smartphones to host Viv Labs’ AI assistant, Samsung is planning to quickly expand this functionality to its other products in the near future. In addition to that, the South Korean tech giant is planning to expand its market presence by launching the platform as an open source project so that anyone can utilize it in their own hardware free of charge. In other words, Samsung is continuing its human-centered IoT strategy and is about to make a major push on the market in the next 12 months.