Samsung is all out to join the artificial intelligence (AI) race as the South Korean giant has agreed to acquire Viv Labs, the startup behind Viv an AI assistant system which is "radically simplifying the world by providing an intelligent interface to everything." Interestingly, Viv was co-founded by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham, the creators of Apple's Siri. The trio founded Viv in 2012, which is an intelligent assistant and an open platform wherein any developer can add more knowledge and capabilities to it. Viv was unveiled at Disrupt NY tech conference in New York back in May. The news about Samsung acquiring Viv Labs was confirmed by TechCrunch, and also through a blog post by Kittlaus.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. on Thursday said it agreed to acquire Viv Labs Inc., the company behind open artificial intelligence platform Viv. The financial details of the transactions were not disclosed by the company. With Viv, Samsung will be able to unlock and offer new service experiences for its customers, including one that simplifies user interfaces, understands the context of the user and offers the user the most appropriate and convenient suggestions and recommendations, the company said in a statement. As part of the acquisition, the founding team will work closely with Samsung's Mobile Communications business, but continue to operate independently under its existing leadership, the statement added. Viv was founded by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham, the original creators of Siri, in 2012.

Samsung has agreed to acquire Viv, the next-gen AI assistant that was developed by Siri co-founders Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer. TechCrunch reports that it will continue to operate as an independent company, providing services to Samsung and its platforms. Viv made numerous headlines earlier this year, when the team demonstrated the power of its assistant. In one scenario, it was able to successfully order a pizza over the Internet customized with toppings from several employees with a few simple voice commands. Here are some excerpts from Kittlaus' Medium post regarding the acquisition: Samsung, as you surely know, is the market leader in smart devices across a wide range of use cases and industries.

Samsung has agreed to acquire Viv, an AI and assistant system co-founded by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham -- who created Siri, which was acquired by Apple in 2010. The three left Apple in the years after the acquisition and founded Viv in 2012. Pricing information was not available, but we'll check around. Viv has been billed as a more extensible, powerful version of Siri. Viv will continue to operate as an independent company that will provide services to Samsung and its platforms.

NVIDIA's (NASDAQ:NVDA) quarterly revenues have been surging at double-digit rates in the last three quarters and, looking at the guidance for the next quarter, it's clear that the company is expecting the growth rate to continue unabated in the near future. One of the key factors that has added fuel to their engines is NVIDIA's new growth drivers: the data center segment and auto segment. In the most recent quarter, NVIDIA's data center unit reported 151 million in sales, a growth of 109.72% The growth in data center revenues is much higher than other segments, and there are several reasons why this growth can, in fact, continue its breakneck pace for several more quarters. NVIDIA's expertise in the GPU segment has given it a range of must-have products for hyperscale data centers.

Looking at Apple's latest shopping list, there no denying the fact that Tim Cook has big plans for the artificial intelligence industry. What seems like a shopping spree, only months after buying Turi, and also recollecting that Apple bought Perceptio at the end of 2015, rumors of the firm buying another machine learning startup have resurfaced. This time it's India/US based machine learning startup called Tuplejump. Though the representative from Apple neither denied nor acknowledged the buzz going around, but they didn't either shy away from giving their standard response when they do acquire a company: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." The Hyderabad-based firm helps companies to store, process and visualise big data.

Alphabet Inc's Google has renamed its business-to-business cloud computing brand and enhanced some enterprise applications using artificial intelligence, the company's latest gambit to better compete with Amazon.com and Microsoft Corp. in the lucrative cloud business. Discussing the rebranded Google Cloud, Diane Greene, senior vice president of Google's enterprise business, said the company has made good progress courting customers and improving its technology. Cloud computing uses remote internet servers to store, manage and process data, and Google offers a range of apps like word processing and email, as well as the ability to host data and offer resources for developers. The new name replaces the Google for Work brand. "We are closing the gap incredibly fast" with competitors, Greene, a former CEO of VMware who joined Google last year to ramp up its cloud business, told experts and journalists at an event.

Reorganizing itself under the umbrella company Alphabet has done wonders for Google -- but less so for a grab bag of eclectic projects ranging from robotic cars to internet-beaming balloons, which are suffering costly growing pains. A year after Alphabet took shape, Google's revenue growth has accelerated -- an unusual development for a company of its size. That success, however, also underscores Alphabet's dependence on the fickle business of placing digital ads in core Google products like search, Gmail and YouTube video. As a result, it remains vulnerable to swings in marketing budgets and stiffening competition from another equally ambitious rival, Facebook. Alphabet was supposed to speed the process of turning offshoot businesses into new technological jackpots.

Apple has acquired the Indian startup Tuplejump. This is the fourth machine learning company acquired by the high-tech giant over a one year period. Tuplejump's takeover by Apple actually happened in June but went unnoticed until now, according to Bloomberg. Tuplejump founder Rohit Rai is not living in Seattle, where Turi is located and he began working for Apple in May. Among Tuplejump's dozen workers, many were already based on the U.S. west coast.

Customer attrition, also known as customer churn, customer turnover, or customer defection, is the loss of clients or customers. Banks, telephone service companies, Internet service providers, pay TV companies, insurance firms, and alarm monitoring services, often use customer attrition analysis and customer attrition rates as one of their key business metrics (along with cash flow, EBITDA, etc.) because the cost of retaining an existing customer is far less than acquiring a new one. Companies from these sectors often have customer service branches which attempt to win back defecting clients, because recovered long-term customers can be worth much more to a company than newly recruited clients. Churn prediction is one of the most popular Big Data use cases in business. It consists of detecting customers who are likely to cancel a subscription to a service.