Samsung Looking to Upgrade Bixby By Acquiring Fluenty, An Artificial Intelligence Startup
Fluenty is a smart reply assistant application, which can be run in both Korean and in English. When given a text, it can suggest automatic replies which range from witty to actual informational answers. Founded by developers previously at Naver and Daum, two of the biggest Korean search engines, the developers already have experience in creating intelligent algorithms. The service is available on KakaoTalk, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, and Line. It launched in the US in 2015 and South Korea in 2016. It seems that now Samsung has acquired the firm, after investing nearly a million dollars in the company last year in September. This likely comes as an effort from Samsung to further improve their currently-lackluster AI assistant Bixby.
Bixby has been long criticised for its lack of features, launching even without voice recognition. When compared to its competitors, it’s simply no contest and Bixby loses out, even today and even though Bixby offers some innovative features. Samsung looks to be wanting to change that, and will probably be looking to integrate the team of engineers, assets and IP they have acquired into improving the artificial intelligence.
This comes after just last month Samsung relaunched its Samsung Research division, which integrates the Digital Media & Communications Research Center and Software Center into one division of the company, with the sole purpose of improving their AI technology. Samsung has already made acquisitions in the past with the intention of improving its AI when it bought out the Viv Labs startup in the US last year. Samsung’s smart home appliances are also likely to integrate Bixby at some point, so it seems Samsung is gearing themselves up for an all-out improvement on their artificial intelligence services. With the acquisition of the whole team behind Fluenty, it may be possible that soon Samsung can outpace its competitors, though they are in a position where they have to catch up, rather than put themselves in the lead.
Source: The Investor
0 comments:
Post a Comment