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Comment by falaki | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.~

The end-user can still install them.

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.

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

That's not the point. Default is king.

I meant to edit my post but the time ran out.

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.

That comes across as well... Pretty anti competitive. Akin to Internet Explorer on Windows.

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".

> I wonder if Samsung would ever put this on their Android Phones.

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)

I believe it's possible, they have already tried putting all kinds of apps on their devices that are meant to replace Google functionality.

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 agree it is unlikely that it would be able to compete with Google Now. I see Samsung having more success putting this into their appliances.

And they have their smart watches too.

I imagine you'll be able to change AI much like keyboards. They'll have theirs default and most people won't bother changing it.

> They'll have theirs default and most people won't bother changing it.

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).

I too like the movie 'Her'

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