Samsung just purchased Viv – the company who created Siri, the Voice Assistant used by Apple

Voice Assistants and Artificial Intelligence, so hot right now. With Google pushing their next generation assistant, it’s no surprise that Samsung is also looking to move forward with their own assistant and rather than building one, they’ve today announced the purchase of Viv, the same company who originally built Siri, the voice assistant used by Apple in iOS.

Viv isn’t just creating virtual assistants, it’s more along the lines of Artificial Intelligence and Viv’s platform provides sophisticated natural language understanding and machine learning capabilities as well as partnerships with developers who will move Samsung forward in this area.

Samsung intends for their purchase to open a new, open ecosystem that will allow developers to ‘use and build conversational assistants and integrate a natural language-based interface into renowned applications and services’.

Samsung says that this purchase represents their ‘commitment to virtual personal assistants and is part of the company’s broader vision to deliver an AI-based open ecosystem across all of its devices and services’. This statement could include a wide-range of devices, not just Android with Samsung actively trying to move their Tizen platform forward, meaning you could see an assistant active across all their devices from watches, phones, TVs and even their refrigerators.

Injong Rhee, CTO of the Mobile Communications business at Samsung Electronics has released a video talking about how this acquisition will help Samsung move forward with simplifying how Samsung interacts with their users using AI and Assistants and what the Viv acquisition means to them, including allowing open interaction with developers.

According to TechCrunch, Viv Labs will continue operate as an independent company, though how long that will go on for is unclear.

Viv has been working on their new assistant for some time now, and though it hasn’t been released as yet they did show it off at TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this year:

When we’ll see the results of this acquisition incorporated into Samsung isn’t clear but one thing is clear, AI is going to really be something big in the next few years.