War of titans: Samsung Galaxy S8 and iPhone8 fight for the top spot
Samsung and Apple are getting ready to launch their latest product Galaxy S8 and iPhone 8 also known as iPhone ‘Edition’) being 10th Anniversary of iPhone. Samsung Galaxy S8 will aim to capture a much higher demand than its predecessor Galaxy S7 after their flagship smartphone Galaxy Note7 was withdrawn from the market due to faulty batteries.
The Galaxy S8’s bigger display compared to iPhone8’s OLED display and functional area instead of a fingerprint sensor.
The Galaxy S8’s projected shipment of around 45million units in 2017, is much lower than that of Galaxy S7’ 52 million units. Samsung Galaxy S8 will offer a visual search and optical character recognition tool using the Galaxy S8’s camera. The camera app come with a Bixby button to access the assistant, so that the Al, developed by Viv, a startup acquired by Samsung recently, can scan/identify the image and search for it online, a feature similar to Google’s Goggles app.
Viv, an artificial intelligence company based in San Jose, California, founded by Kittlaus three years ago, backed by $30m funds from Iconiq Capital who helped to manage fortunes of Mark Zuckerberg. The last company co-founded by Dag Kittalus invented Siri, the original virtual assistant now an Apple product standard. Siri Inc. acquired by the tech giant for $200m in 2010. According to Kittlaus the virtual assistants he invented are limited in their capabilities, as now Viv has a system that is 10, 000 times more capable and will shift the economics of the Internet.
In 2012, Kittlaus, Cheyer and another Siri Inc software engineer, Chris Brigham, left apple around and invented Viv. Kittlaus taps the phone and brings up how far the Uber is away that could come and collect him and demonstrate how those services just work together. Viv designed to be totally open and cope with any service, product or knowledge that any company or individual wants to imbue with a speaking component can be plugged into the network to work together on the fly. It is a program that writes its own program, coordinating thousands of services working together that know nothing about one another.
Samsung purchased SmartThings for $200m back in 2014 and with the new acquisition Viv, a cross-platform agnostic brain that can power several SmartThings verticals. And ensure “Internet of Things” is just a dumb term of the past.
With Viv Samsung will unlock and offer new service experiences for its customers, including one that simplifies user interfaces, understands the context of the user and offer the user most accurate and convenient suggestions and recommendations. Samsung is well-positioned to take a leadership position in that space because of this entire new space of things, and a vision to create a new backbone to pull all these together to create critical mass around that” according to Kittlaus.