Samsung’s acquisition of Viv will help it stay relevant

Samsung recently announced its plan to acquire Viv Labs, which has created an AI personal assistant by the same team behind Apple’s Siri. The acquisition marks Samsung’s entry into the AI space, which comes at a critical time. Google has launched Assistant on Google Home and the Pixel smart phone, while Apple has finally put in place APIs to allow third parties to leverage Siri. In fact, when Apple acquired Siri it was designed to be an open platform, but when it became clear that Apple wanted it to become a closed service, the majority of the team behind Siri moved on to create Viv. This time Viv Labs will continue to operate as a separate company and with its existing team in place. The acquisition is a smart move by Samsung who is trailing behind Google and Apple in the digital personal assistant space.

Currently, most assistant services are programmed so that queries are executed within a domain (eg messaging, payments, location, calling, etc). While links can be made between these siloed domains, they must be explicitly coded. As connecting domains is a time consuming process these links are often not in place, which is the reason that attempting to execute conversational requests that span multiple domains rarely works. An example of such a request would be “book me a taxi home from the station when my train arrives in London”. In this case the system would need to be aware of the arrival time of a user’s train, understand where the train arrives and where home is as well as know a preferred taxi service to place a booking. Viv gets around this issue by using dynamic program generation, which essentially means that it generates domain links on the fly. This allows Viv to address questions that its major competitors are currently unable to handle. Viv can easily combine services from a range of sources to satisfy a user’s needs.

Moreover, Viv is designed to be open and, as the company has no services to speak of, it is completely reliant on third party developers. Its open nature is attractive to developers as they will not compete with Viv for attention, whereas the assistant products from Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon all put their own services front and center. Assistant and Cortana are tightly linked to search on Google and Bing, while Siri and Alexa are both keen to push users to services in the Apple and Amazon ecosystem. Viv is designed to offer something different to its competitors. As it is open, it relies on third party developers to teach the system how to interact with their services, which should encourage a far broader range of services to be accessible through the application. Where its competition has been slow in supporting new services, the team behind Viv is keen to see as many services link into the app as possible. Viv will learn information about users’ likes and dislikes and other personal information in order to provide increasingly relevant suggestions.

The mobile industry currently exists in the era of apps, which are the medium through which products and services are delivered. To discover new services, users must search app store catalogs and install apps onto a device. The availability of apps can make or break mobile platforms. Apple still requires third party applications, such as Uber or WhatsApp to be installed on an iPhone before they can be used by Siri. This is not the case with Viv, which acts as an abstraction layer, suggesting services based on the user’s needs. Services are delivered through the Viv app, which could be very useful for Samsung. Its own operating system, Tizen, currently suffers from a lack of apps. An issue that Samsung has recently sought to address by launching competitions with cash prizes for developers. While Viv will not be a replacement for native apps as voice interaction is not always convenient, it will help by ensuring that key services are supported.

With Viv reportedly coming to market with the Galaxy S8 in 2017, Samsung will have a digital personal assistant that can leapfrog Apple, Google and Microsoft (as they currently stand) in terms of functionality. However, as we are still in the early days of AI and Apple, Google and Microsoft are sure to come back. Apple alone has made several acquisitions in the AI/ML space in this year alone, which it will leverage in future iterations of Siri. The acquisition is a win-win for the two companies as Viv needed to find a home, which it did in the largest consumer electronics vendor. Viv gives Samsung improved credibility in the nascent AI space and an assistant it can use across its product portfolio, from smart watches and smart phones to televisions and refrigerators. In the long term, assistants will become core to platforms and the user experience of CE products. Viv is therefore important for Samsung to ensure its products stay relevant. If Samsung hopes to decrease its reliance on Android and Google in the smart phone space in the future, Viv will be a critical asset.