
Samsung is building its own AI assistant for the Galaxy S8 - CapitalistCartr
https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/07/samsung-ai/
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exabrial
Does anyone _actually_ use these voice assistants regularly (other than when
it first came out)? If so, what for?

I find most people just use Siri to ask questions to show it off and see if
they can get some comic relief from the answers... and then curse the rest of
the time when they accidently activate it.

I _do_ use voice-to-text quite often.

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pookieinc
I mainly use it in two ways (in order of usage): 1\. To set reminders and
timers, 2\. To find quick answers, ie. I actually _just_ used it to find out
what time sunset is and it answered fine. I might sometimes ask it a bit more
complex things like "What time is the GSW game on tonight?", but anything
research-related or more challenging questions, I leave to Google.

My biggest gripe with this whole voice assistant thing is is, when I think of
a query, I usually _want_ to Google it because I enjoy going to Wikipedia (or
some related article) and reading about it myself, picking out the sections I
find interesting and reading about them, which sometimes leads me deeper into
other areas of interest. I don't find that joy when an AI tells me what I want
to hear. That's my biggest limitation to using these things. That and Siri
never understanding me.

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jdc0589
exact same usage. 90% of my usage is setting alarms/timers/location or time
based reminders. Voice instructions are a lot easier than ANY interface for
that stuff.

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wittekm
So, when is somebody going to do an assistant abstraction layer so you can
plug your service into all N of these things?

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neals
I hope Apple is going to hook Siri up to that layer to get better results
though...

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digi_owl
Woa, someone is an optimist.

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jdc0589
didn't they just buy some company that already had one, or was already
building one?

Edit: yep, they bought Viv Labs Inc. on Oct 6th.

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wklauss
At this point they don't have many options. Google seems determined to limit
Assistant to their hardware.

That being said, I'm not sure the developer community has enough interest in
supporting that many AI assistants on their apps (Siri, Assistant, Alexa,
Cortana...)

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CapitalistCartr
People seem to love an oligopoly of two. I call it Coke vs. Pepsi thinking.

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shostack
Personally in this case I'd love for more competition. However I'll probably
never buy a Samsung phone now between how awful their version of Android is,
lack of updates, explosion concerns, and the fact that I don't think they will
ever have an assistant that can rival Google.

They are good at hardware in ways Apple is not, but both Apple and Samsung are
horrible at web integrated services like this compared to Google. I just don't
think it's in their DNA.

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djsumdog
I feel like Samsung is preparing for the day they can leave the Google eco-
system behind. But as of now, it's not viable. The lockin is strong. It's hard
enough to build apps to work with both Google services and Amazon Fire
services.

Their UI is pretty terrible. I wipe my devices and usually install a mod like
Cyanogen or Omni. But I wish we didn't need mods; I wish we could just install
stock AOSP on everything just like a base install of Windows (before MS
started adding junkware to it in Win10). I wrote a post about this a while
back: [http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-
fragmentation/](http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/)

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shostack
> "Samsung is preparing for the day they can leave the Google eco-system
> behind"

I think you mean "preparing for the day Google leaves them behind."

Google's path with the Pixel, if successful, puts them on more of an Apple
trajectory. I saw a recent stat that 9/10 smartphones run Android, so they've
dominated the industry already. The question though is whether that would
still stay the same if Samsung wasn't in the mix.

Beyond that, the hardware is fast becoming commoditized as everyone realizes
that at a certain point, the core features that make people buy a phone will
be cloud-based and increasingly with wearable peripherals your fancy phone
will be sitting in your pocket while the inputs are worn.

Those who can't differentiate on software and services will be relegated to
low-margin commodity hardware providers. However those who own the ecosystem
are asserting their control to build what will likely be an insurmountable
moat.

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bitmapbrother
I was about to say the same thing. The problem for Samsung is that they need
Google and their ecosystem. The other problem for Samsung is that Google
doesn't need Samsung anymore. That's not to say Google doesn't want Samsung as
an Android partner, but if that day ever came and Samsung decided to switch to
Tizen their impact on the Android landscape today wouldn't be as impactful as
it would have been years ago.

As Google establishes their supply chain, carrier relationships and grows
their hardware unit they'll soon have all of the pieces in place to become the
only true competitor to the iPhone in terms of a unified software and hardware
experience. Pretty much every review of the Pixel has raved about its
performance, touch responsiveness and camera quality. If you're trying to
decide which high end Android phone to buy then the Pixel is at the top of
that list. Not bad for a first try that was made in only half the time of
their competitor's phones.

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CoryG89
But will it be capable of putting out fires?

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Postosuchus
"Sammy, make my phone STOP BURNING THROUGH MY THIGH!!!"

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gonyea
But how will this fit in with their lineup of "things that explode"?

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grawlinson
It will make funny exploding noises. Basically a glorified fart app.

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miguelrochefort
This is the worst kind of fragmentation.

