
Samsung acquires Viv, a next-gen AI assistant built by creators of Apple’s Siri - coloneltcb
https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/05/samsung-acquires-viv-a-next-gen-ai-assistant-built-by-creators-of-apples-siri/
======
cocktailpeanuts
Unfortunately I think it's pretty obvious why they were acquired, so 99%
skeptical of their future. They were probably acquired because:

1\. They realized just owning the software platform is very limiting (For
example they can't compete with Apple no matter how good they are. Just look
at Google maps. Thousand times better than the default Apple maps but will
never be #1 map app on iOS because people always choose the default). Also,
now even Google is moving towards owning their own hardware platform. As a VC
funded company I think this is the best timing to exit. Otherwise it's all
downhill from here.

2\. Samsung wants to fight with Google/Apple/Amazon/MS and needed a weapon
(because, you know, people say AI is the future nowadays).

So at best these guys will be integrated into Samsung phones to differentiate
Samsung's hardware. I don't see them becoming the "open platform" that they
envisioned at all.

~~~
Steko
> Just look at Google maps. Thousand times better than the default Apple maps

No it isn't, they are basically the same for 90% of users.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
I wish apple gave me a fair choice. I do prefer Google maps but i keep also
using stupid apple maps because it keeps coming up.

~~~
Razengan
As pointed out by another comment here [1], Google doesn't give you a "fair
choice" in these things (beyond the ability to install competitors' offerings
as separate apps) either:

> _Google 's MADA agreement forbids OEMs from making anything but Google
> Now/Voice Search the default digital assistant on Android devices with
> Google Play._

> _Google is telling it 's hardware partners for Google Home and Google Cast
> they're forbidden from supporting competing digital assistants._

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12649533](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12649533)

~~~
tf2manu994
Yes, but at least on Android you can change your defaults.

On iOS, you cannot.

~~~
Razengan
Ah yes, iOS doesn't let you do that, but third-party apps can choose to open
stuff in the Chrome/YouTube/etc. apps if they want to.

~~~
Klathmon
I'm sorry but thats not good enough.

On Android I can make a new email client, and overnight it can become the
default email client for everyone that installs it.

On iOS I would need to convince most large apps to allow me as an option
before it would work.

Not being able to do this is basically the last thing keeping me off of iOS at
this point.

~~~
SysArchitect
Thank fuck.

Open some app: Would you like me to be the default for X? Me: no thanks.

Next day:

open some app: Would you like me to be the default for X? Me: ahhh, NOT AGAIN.

Or have we forgotten how annoying it is that browsers all seem to do that all
the damn time.

~~~
Klathmon
It doesn't need to follow Windows or Android's UX, but it should be allowed.

Something like a settings menu where you can control the default apps for many
"intents" (that's the android terminology, not sure what else to call it).

Choose an app for email, sms, "instant messaging", browser, navigation, phone,
etc... Don't let individual apps change anything, and if you want don't even
let them prompt you to change something. That last part can be enforced by
appstore guidelines.

If apple does this, i'd switch overnight. And as someone that is about as far
away from the apple ecosystem as you can be, i'd probably end up using many of
the apple "things" over time. Let their first party apps stand on their own. I
have no qualms with having theirs be the default, and it honestly doesn't even
bother me if they aren't un-installable, but let me change my defaults!

------
Fricken
The AI platform that wins won't necessarily be the one that provides the most
utility. It'll be the one that people bond with emotionally. I'm not talking
about you here- I'm talking about teenage girls with self esteem issues,
recently landed immigrants working as night janitors, divorcees with drinking
problems, and anyone else who needs a friend.

It's a technical challenge now, but in a few years making a good AI will be
high art. By a few years I could mean 3 years or 23 years. There's the
possibility that dressing an AI assistant up in a personality that asks 'how
are you feeling?' could lead us into an uncanny valley that takes a long time
to cross.

~~~
Yodoshi
During Google's hardware/AI Assistant a point was made about wanting google
assistant to emote based on context and be personal to the user, 'A personal
google for everyone.

This plays to your suggestion of emotional bonding being a key need for AI
assistant's.

Though having it called 'Google assistant' seems to break that connection,
though imagine something is in the pipeline being tested and analysed over and
over to see what works with AI connecting with a user.

~~~
Fricken
If you think people are concerned with privacy now, an AI that people -kids-
are spilling their deepest darkest secrets to will really creep us out.

It's probably best left to a third party to skin the Google assistant with
soft skills. A small startup can afford to gamble on these things. Google (or
Viv, Facebook, Cortana et al) need only provide the underlying capability, in
such a way that they can wash their hands of it should it invoke a public
backlash.

Just so long as they're collecting the data they need to ultimately know you
better than you know yourself.

------
te_chris
So the value in AI startups is basically the number of ML/AI scientists you
have times X million/scientist these days (perhaps multiplied by some sort of
factor that measures the promise of your usually-not-working product).

Given this, wouldn't it make sense for AI/ML people to form a guild and/or
union and capture this value themselves, rather than let smooth-talking
founders take all the cash?

------
deagler
This is going to be great, The worlds top firms are now in direct competition
with each other.

Microsoft(Cortana), Amazon(Echo), Apple(Siri), Google(Assistant/Now) and now
Samsung with Viv. The possibilites are just endless, the space race netted us
a lot of innovation and this should do the same. Competition leads to
Innovation

~~~
aswanson
Competition is for losers. 10 years ago the battle was microsoft vs yahoo and
whoever...and it turned out the ones to pay attention to were fb and
twtr...etc. The big innovation, the one to dominate headlines in 10 years, is
likely unknown, run by a few guys on a shoestring and barely on the radar
right now.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
MS, Apple, and Google are very much still around.

Twitter and Yahoo are up for sale.

FB is the only innovator on your list that could be classed as a newcomer. And
it's been around for more than a decade.

I doubt we'll see the big innovation from a garage now, because the cost of
entry has become too high for shoestring operators to succeed.

ML training needs fast, expensive hardware. You can experiment with it on a
1080 graphics card, but for industrial applications you need a _lot_ more
speed and power.

~~~
aswanson
The cost of starting a transistor startup in the 1950s was too high so the
traitorous 8 started Fairchild.

The cost of starting a SSI company was too high in 1968 so 3 dudes started
intel.

The cost of starting a new mainframe company in 1976 was too high for most
garage ops but turns out two hippies were ready with a better, cheaper,
replacement product anyway.

The cost of starting a pc company for Gates and Allen was too high in 1981 so
they left it to IBM and wrote the OS. Turned out ok.

The cost of starting and OS company in 95 was too high for Brin and Page so
they left it to msft and looked at how to reliably search the web.

The cost of starting a search engine was too high in 2004 so Zuck looked at
how to connect people rather than documents. Good call.

See a pattern?

------
shalstvedt
Does anyone else have the feeling that the ecosystem lock-in inherent in all
of these large primarily hardware-focused companies isn't necessarily the
whole future? I can imagine things like airport kiosks, coffee machines,
subway terminals, hotel front desks, and other everyday objects or
conglomerations of objects that aren't part of the consumer market most of
these companies target also having such an interface, and they may not want to
give all of that to Google or Amazon for instance.

Making that software seems like a necessity to me (the "operating system" of
the future) and I'm not sure how it fits in with the current trajectory.
Thoughts?

~~~
lallysingh
The large vendors are using phone revenue to fund fundamental conversational
AI research. Eventually it'll get commiditized. Either as discoverable
microservices that your favorite conversational AI finds, or as tiny ones for
each device. I'm not sure which one is really worse.

------
choicewords
Make AI startup, get acquired, quit, repeat

~~~
itg
As long as the founder(s) know what they're doing. I've seen way too many AI
startups with founders who don't even have the most basic ML knowledge but are
doing it because it's the trend.

~~~
mastazi
Replace "ML knowledge" with "CS / SW Eng. knowledge" and I would say this has
always existed in the start-up world. My personal opinion is that lack of
basic technical knowledge is a major no-no unless at least one of the other
co-founders is technical.

------
thowAway7890
Viv still uses Nuance according to their last demo, viv seems to be just a
developers platform. Even Siri does not use Nuance anymore. Samsung probably
needs developers for their IoT products in order to compete.

Pixel's new assistant will not be available on other android devices with
nougat so make sense that Samsung will have to bundle their own into their
devices.

~~~
singularity2001
>> Siri does not use Nuance anymore

evidence?

It still sucks.

------
jjcm
I'm amazed that the founders didn't have some sort of non-compete agreement
here.

Excited that it's a more extensible digital assistant though. I think the
reason why I like Alexa the most out of the services right now is that it
feels like the easiest to add new functionality too. Hopefully this will pave
the way for more open ai assistants.

~~~
cstejerean
California doesn't believe in non-competes. The state believes that
competition is in the public interest and enforcing non-competes would be
counter to that.

~~~
Ph0X
But what about patents?

~~~
robotresearcher
Federal law.

------
falaki
I wonder if Samsung would ever put this on their Android Phones. I am
confident it will not be able to compete with Google Now on the same device.

In addition to founders, Viv got a good number of early Siri engineers. From
this and other hints I gather its internals are similar to first few versions
of Siri. For example, they outsource the Speech component (something Apple
still does for several languages). A consequence of that design is separating
speech recognition from NLP, which makes it inherently more error-prone than
Google Now.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Arguably, it may only have made sense for Samsung to buy Viv if Samsung is
planning on ditching Google entirely.

\- Google's MADA agreement forbids OEMs from making anything but Google
Now/Voice Search the default digital assistant on Android devices with Google
Play.

\- Google is telling it's hardware partners for Google Home and Google Cast
they're forbidden from supporting competing digital assistants.

So, having Viv as a second digital assistant which isn't default on their own
devices and doesn't support any of the products Google's does, doesn't make a
lot of sense. But if they need something compelling on Tizen to launch an
exodus from Google's platform, where the Pixel has just been declared to get a
ton of exclusive features they won't have access to... well, that'd be a
reason for Samsung to buy Viv.

~~~
Razengan
> Google ... forbids OEMs ... from supporting competing digital assistants.

~Wow, that kinda makes all the ire — including the comments on this page —
directed towards Apple for its "walled garden" and "not allowing choice" seem
a bit unfair.~

~~~
tf2manu994
The end-user can still install them.

~~~
Razengan
You can install other maps/browsers/assistants on iOS too, and other apps can
interface with them if they want to. For example Chrome will automatically
open YouTube links in the YouTube app. I agree that iOS is more restricted in
that it doesn't let the user specify the default browser etc. for links from
other apps, however.

~~~
nileshtrivedi
Alternative browsers on iOS are forced to use webkit engine. Also, I don't
think you can install alternative dialer/SMS apps, can you?

------
Everhusk
Was really hoping to play with the dynamic code generation part of their SDK,
hopefully they still get around to launching it.

------
S_A_P
I'm just curious how the founders were able to somehow negotiate a deal to
sell Siri and then go right back into the same arena and create a "better"
version. How would apple or any company allow those terms?!?

~~~
scarlac
They didn't just sell to Apple and immediately quit. They stayed around for
some years, which is a common contract condition. You can't practically
require people to not innovate after they left a company.

------
camillomiller
Dag kittlaus & friends placed two successful AI exits in ten years. Just wow.

------
thedangler
I hope they integrate it with Smarthings. Maybe make the hub a device like
Google home or Echo to integrate with all the devices.

------
jheriko
if this one doesn't turn itself on when its in my pocket, and doesn't start
phoning random people without any speech like noises happening, i can see this
being slightly less of a gimmick than siri... :P

kudos to these guys though, i never followed their story after apple took them
on, and just assumed they would still be there. selling something then going
back to doing the same thing, and doing it better... i find that admirable.

also despite my opinion on siri being "doesn't even work, not even close" i do
look forward to more and better developments in that direction. although a
part of me wonders if we won't just be wiring ourselves directly into our
devices by the time this sort of tech becomes truly useful. :)

------
mark_l_watson
I wonder if this is part of a move by Samsung to move off of Android? In some
ways that would be a shame - the only phones I have owned are Samsung Android
phones, love them.

Still, Samsung is large enough to build and maintain their own stack.

~~~
LukeB_UK
They've been maintaining their own set of apps that mirror Google apps on
Android for a long time.

~~~
douche
They are hot garbage, too. It's really ridiculous, you get a new Samsung phone
and it has the default google/android apps, a copycat set of Samsung apps, and
often a third set of carrier-specific apps that are even _more_ of a dumpster
fire.

------
aerovistae
For how much they hyped their product this is a pretty inconspicuous exit.

------
Adam_O
That reminds me of an interview i saw a few months ago with one of their main
guys:

[https://charlierose.com/videos/28249](https://charlierose.com/videos/28249)

------
douche
Crap, another piece of preinstalled bloatware I won't be able to remove from
my next phone without rooting it.

------
smegel
John Gruber is going to love this one.

~~~
geodel
Indeed. He also loved the Galaxy Note 7 beating iPhone 7 with earlier launch.

~~~
smegel
It was early all right.

------
the_mitsuhiko
It's very disappointing that Apple got stuck with Siri and does not really
improve on what they have. I assume part of it has to do with the fact that
they are very careful about customer data and a lot of what makes assistants
useful is having as much data in the cloud as possible.

Still. As an iOS user I'm very jealous of what exists on other platforms now.

~~~
IMcD23
Siri has been getting better ever since its release. Have you used it in iOS
10? It now has 3rd party integration with Uber and Lyft, Venmo, and many other
apps. Its reliability and usability have drastically improved since Siri 1.0
on the iPhone 4S.

~~~
the_mitsuhiko
No integration with the apps i care about: spotify, google maps, gmail and
many others.

~~~
justinlardinois
Isn't that on Spotify and Google to implement?

~~~
julien_c
You have a whitelist of possible domains though (Messaging and payments being
the most common for now)

