A month ago Samsung announced the purchase of Viv, the company responsible for a promising voice assistant with its own artificial intelligence engine. Those responsible for that company are former Apple engineers who were in charge of Siri, and the purchase suggested an option that has now been confirmed.

That’s right : Samsung has indicated that the future Samsung Galaxy S8 include a voice assistant itself , which is obviously the result of the recent acquisition and highlights the relevance for large technology have both artificial intelligence and the role Of the voice assistants. What can Viv contribute in this context, and why has Samsung made this decision?

Pixel and Google Assistant: Samsung sees the ears of the wolf

Samsung has been taking its more and its less with Google for years. The commitment Tizen was now limited to input range smartphones and smart watches, but it seemed that Samsung could keep the letter for possible use in terminals that are more ambitious.

In fact there was a time when Samsung wanted to differentiate itself from that “pure” version of Android by providing its own services and applications (S Health, Samsung Pay, Knox, and of course its own store, Galaxy Apps). It has maintained many of them and it has also been differentiated in the visual finish of the operating system on their handsets, but it seemed that everything had quieted in recent times.

That has changed with the release by Google of Pixel and Pixel XL, devices that directly attack the high – end and make this company a rival for Samsung , which was the great reference in this segment based devices On Android. Not only that: it has done so with the differential feature of Google Assistant, which at the moment is only available natively on these phones.

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A plan B with developers through

That seems to have returned to make Samsung implement such a plan B to differentiate which until now was his partner in this journey but is also posing a real competition with features like Google Assistant that are not available at the moment or for devices Samsung or for other manufacturers of Android-based smartphones.

Google is likely to finish Assistant reaching these manufacturers as a “global” version of Android, but it is not known when it will happen. Meanwhile what has made Google itself a few months ago is to open the API Awareness of Google Assistant, and will soon offer developers a set of tools to create applications for Google assistant should logically be able to benefit in all types of terminals.

Samsung also prepares moves in this direction, and its executive vice president, Rhee Injong said that “developers can associate and upload services to our agent”, which means that also feed his assistant with applications and services that enhance their chances and connect To all kinds of services. This is important when you can “talk” to the wizard and ask for example an Uber, a pizza or any other option that interacts with the APIs of other services on the internet.

Voice assistants, increasingly differential

All the greats of technology seem to rely on voice assistants as absolute protagonists of our future interaction with all kinds of services and devices. Google is considered as the most advanced in this field, and the evolution of Google Now has given way to an ambitious Google Assistant once again not only answers our questions but is ahead of our needs … or is do it.

Something similar try to achieve Microsoft with Cortana, Amazon with Alexa and Apple with Siri, although the efficiency and performance of each of these assistants is different and generally analysts agree that they go one step behind Google. Facebook has not introduced a wizard own voice, but his artificial intelligence platform is responsible for “giving life” to chatbots its Messenger instant messaging application.

That could change in the short term: the investment platforms of artificial intelligence is evident in all these companies, and that will result assistants from much more powerful voice and also allow infer any information from the data they collect from Our activity with the smartphone, the computer or any service of these companies. These services learn day after day, and that knowledge ends up becoming food for those artificial intelligence engines.