Samsung has confirmed that its upcoming flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S8, will feature an artificial intelligence digital assistant. The company has bigger plans of expanding AI to other products.
The growing popularity of Microsoft's Cortana, Apple's Siri and Google's Google Assistant highlights that people want digital assistants in their devices. Although a digital assistant feature is currently limited to a small number of devices, it may be included in more gadgets in the near term.
Meet Viv, Samsung's Intelligent Personal Assistant
In October this year, Samsung acquired Viv Labs, the creator of Viv, an intelligent personal assistant. Viv Labs is being run by the co-creator of Siri. Samsung is planning to integrate the Viv AI platform in its Galaxy mobile phones, which means that the company wants to bounce back after the failure of its Galaxy Note 7.
Although Viv will be a great response to the likes of Siri, Cortana and more, the voice assistant will also make its way to Samsung home appliances and wearable technology devices.
"Viv was built with both consumers and developers in mind. This dual focus is also what attracted us to Viv as an ideal candidate to integrate with Samsung home appliances, wearables and more, as the paradigm of how we interact with technology shifts to intelligent interfaces and voice control" says Injong Rhee, CTO of the mobile communications business at Samsung Electronics.
AI Assistant Not Just For The Galaxy S8
The demand for home automation, or smart homes, is increasing and a variety of smart home products such as smart thermostats, room control units and more have already made their way to many homes.
Samsung has a number of home appliances available in the market such as washing machines, refrigerators, air conditioners and more. Samsung may use Viv in its home appliances to make life easy for homeowners. For instance, with Viv, users can instruct home appliances to work via voice commands.
Moreover, AI makes machines smarter as the technology helps them to learn and adapt automatically through experience, something similar to how humans learn and adapt to perform tasks. This means that machines will not even need human instructions and they will start performing tasks based on regular schedules.
Imagine a smart fridge able to automatically order a specific item and make payments to a supermarket in the absence of a human.
However, some market observers and futurists believe that AI can even exceed human intelligence in the near term, which could also be harmful to humans.
Samsung's move to introduce AI in the next-gen Galaxy S8 is just the start for the company. The success of Viv in the Galaxy S8 is very important after the global recall of Galaxy Note 7 that costs billions of dollars to the Korean company.
The Galaxy S8 is expected to be launched in early 2017, when tech enthusiasts will be able to experience Viv in a smartphone. It remains to be seen how swiftly Samsung brings AI to its other products such as wearables and home appliances.
