Samsung rockets into AI fast lane with Viv purchase

Samsung plans to make its range of smartphones smarter with its acquisition of Viv, an AI virtual assistant platform started by the man who created Siri. The South Korean electronics company, which has been grappling with extended fallout from its recalled Galaxy Note 7, announced Wednesday that it was buying Viv, the machine-learning virtual assistant company started by Siri founder Dag Kittlaus. Where interactions with many of today's virtual assistants still requires users to dumb down their requests into somewhat robotic language, the AI goal is natural language interaction with a virtual assistant that can process layered requests and remember contextual user details. Dag Kittlaus, founder of AI company Viv, was also the man behind Siri, which he sold to Apple.