Samsung acquires Viv, a next-gen AI assistant built by creators of Apple’s Siri
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
No it isn't, they are basically the same for 90% of users.
> 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.
On iOS, you cannot.
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.
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.
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!
This is NOT how it works on android and WP
Meanwhile on my ipad, I feel like Apple is making all the choices and I just have to deal with it. This is the biggest difference between Apple and Android for me. My Android devices have the apps I like and 'just work' when launched or whatever. Apple forcibly opens the Apple apps and I need to run down my screens of installed apps to find what I actually want to run.
I don't know how in this day and age I can't choose my default handlers of a product I own.
1. Install email app.
2. Click on email link in other app.
3. Select email client if more than one installed
4. Click select for now / remember my choice.
5. If you clicked remember email links from all app will start that client.
You can remove almost every default app from iOS 10, including Maps.
I have given up on using the default map for searching anything. Of course the map content itself is the same, but what good is a mobile map if you search for a coffee shop around you in New York and it gives you some grocery store in Scandinavia? I would be forgiving if this happened rarely, but to me it happened very often. I have 4 iDevices and they all have the same problem. This never happens with Google maps.
All of them are far from perfect, but vastly better than what we had before.
At any rate, sure, Apple Maps isn't as good yet. They launched years after Google Maps and with a much smaller team. (There are some interesting politics behind that, from what I've heard; just say that the fiasco of the Maps launch is the primary reason Scott Forstall is no longer with the company.) The team now numbers over 1000, from what I've heard, and I expect the gap to continue to close -- but it's going to continue to take a while.
Frankly both Apple Maps and Google Maps could stand some UI improvements. Google Maps won't shut up, throws up some bizarre progress bar even on mute, has mystery meat navigation, and replaces the map with some giant material design-style empty space when it decides I've "arrived" (even if I haven't).
Apple Maps used to make it hard to pan around, but that's been fixed in iOS 10. Instead now it has terrible bugs in landscape mode, and has adopted the "you've arrived, now you don't need the map any more!" behavior.
If they just let the map be a map...But anyways I'm old enough to remember pulling over to pull out the giant paper map in San Francisco, so I can't get too upset. Either one has made my life so much better.
On iOS? You can tell Google your home/work addresses in settings, I ask for directions/transit home multiple times most weeks and it works. On Android they can figure them out, but on iOS they don't have enough permissions and you'll have to tell them - but when you do this works.
Instead they want me to sign into Google and it wants that info to then be stored on Google's servers.
Samsung doesn't strike me as a great place to end up, but I suspect they were the only place to end up, practically speaking. It'll be interesting to see if they can really compete against Google Now, though.
"Better" is subjective. I used Google Maps since it was released on iOS. I recently switched to Apple for a perceived privacy benefit.
Microsoft is also taking the same approach with Surface tablets, Surface books and upcoming Surface phones
They've been actively chasing away customers. Google is giving unlimited photo storage to Pixel phone buyers. Last year Microsoft took back the 15 GB it had given to Lumia phone buyers.
Tell me about how everyone uses IE on windows.
On iOS, you cannot do that for maps. If an app implements a "View this on a map" feature, I don't believe you have any way of changing which app that link opens in.
Sure, you have the freedom to install whatever app you want. And that freedom begins and ends with manually launching the app; third-party links will still open with Apple Maps.
More likely, Samsung doesn't have the internal chops to build a Cortana/GNow/Siri but has a corporate mandate to have a Samsung version of anything Google does on Android. If you have ever used a Samsung phone, you'll see there's both a bundled (by contract) Google suite of apps and a matching Samsung suite of apps.
I don't think this is a sign of them moving to Tizen or picking a bigger fight with Google or Apple, but a continuation of what they've been doing for several years and something of a non-issue and non-news. I imaigne, like most Samsung apps, it'll be ignored for the superior Google equivalent.
Personally, I'd like to see them leave Android for Tizen. We really need more competition in the mobile space. Shame Samsung isn't serious about leaving Android. The few times I've helped someone with a Samsung phone have been frustrating and confusing. There's just too much Samsung junk on there fighting for your attention.
Or maybe they needed money, but going with those companies would mean acquihire with 100% certainty, and Samsung offered more "free" terms.
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.
If someone can build something you grow empathy and compassion for it will most certainly be a winner.
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.
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.
Google has had so many failures in the calendar/blog/assistant space because Google doesn't understand ordinary people.
It's an elite company full of elite engineers running elite engineering projects (and a lot of search). It has no internal cultural reference point for average-IQ non-elite users.
This is why Google has so bad at productising interesting ideas that Google didn't invent, and which have to deal with real competition.
The software works, mostly. But users don't feel there's anything special or unique about the experience.
You could argue - reasonably - this is all about perception management. Apple does well because it sells its products as stylish and magical. Even if the technological reality is mediocre, Apple has consistently managed to create a brand that is good at making technology seem humanised.
Google has never understood why that kind of marketing is necessary. The technology is good, it should speak for itself. If customers don't get it - no one understands why.
Now with AI, the pitch is out of key for the same reasons. Most people don't want something that anticipates their intentions, because that's just creepy. Even if it works well, it creates an experience of diminished control and empowerment.
It's like someone saying "Trust me" when they're promising you something new, but they've never given you a reason to. Does the AI know you well enough to make the right decisions? Why would it?
Unless Google can dramatise that it does, reliably, they're not going anywhere with this one, no matter how good the technology really is.
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?
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
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.
This isn't the 1990's. AWS exists. Not to mention how hot VC is for AI startups.
Sure, we won't have 15-year olds making the next AI breakthrough but to say that AI is solely in the realm of "big business" is naive.
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?
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?
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.
evidence?
It still sucks.
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.
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.
Except in order to have Google services and the Play store you need to agree to a license with Google, which can easily mandate you not replace their stock apps with your own (or rather, not default to your own, unless the user indicates otherwise).
Now, you could ship a phone without Google Play Services, but that's very unusual in the west (less so in China et al).
Some of it worked, some or even most of it didn't.
One thing that we should keep in mind is that some US based services do not work nearly as good in other languages as they do in English.
For example Google Now didn't work as well in German as it did in English for a very long time. Maybe it's still like this to this day. (didn't try it anymore for some time)
So I can absolutely imagine that currently Google Now in Korean/Chinese is worse than Siri/Google Now was in its first iteration in English. For us in the West their apps might look bad and unusable, but to people in Asia our apps might look equally bad and unusable.
I suspect that may be part of the long-term plan. They already partnered with VoiceBox [0] for some of the services, this seems like a natural expansion into additional services. Possibly sharing leveraging capabilities across both companies.
[0] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/voicebox-provides-na...
(edit: fixed quoting)
- 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.
~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.~
Yes iOS has fewer flexibility in its user-facing options than Android, but Google seems to be no less controlling than Apple.
For some cases, I'm glad that iOS has these restrictions for apps, especially when it comes to Google; on the desktop, when I sign onto YouTube, I automatically get signed in for Google Search and everything else as well. That is something I really hate and find alarming, so much that I only use YouTube in private browsing.
Google can't do that on iOS. They TRY to, in a very creepy way — when I sign-in with an email on their YouTube app, all the other Google apps on my device see that email too — but they can't force global-sign-in on iOS. That's good. Some walls are good.
If the future is dumb, commoditized devices that are basically sensor packages to feed an AI, Google has basically drawn a line in the sand for anyone that wants to use licensed Android and essentially sent the message of "you can only focus on hardware".
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. :)
Still, Samsung is large enough to build and maintain their own stack.
Still. As an iOS user I'm very jealous of what exists on other platforms now.