Samsung processes new digital assistant Viv in Galaxy S8

Samsung wants to process the smart digital assistant Viv in the upcoming Galaxy S8. The company wants the assistant to eventually also work with its household appliances and wearables. Developers could also “add services themselves” to the assistant.

The digital Assistant, which is called Viv, will be the product of Viv Labs, a company that Samsung acquired in October. Viv Labs was relaunched by a co-founder of Apple’s Siri division. Samsung doesn’t reveal much about the implementation of the assistant, but does say that it will get smarter as developers add more services to it.

With the move, Samsung will compete with companies such as Google, Microsoft and Apple, each of which has its own digital assistants in the form of Assistant, Cortana and Siri, respectively. These companies compete with each other to be the first to develop an assistant that makes manual operation of a smartphone more or less unnecessary.

Samsung has to give extra throttle to make up for the loss that the Galaxy Note 7 has made. The flagship aircraft tended to catch fire, eventually leading to a recall of every aircraft worldwide. As a result, the South Korean company made 96 percent less profit in the past quarter than in the same quarter of last year. Nevertheless, the Note product line is not retiring. If the release dates of the previous models are any indication, the Galaxy S8 will hit the market in February or March of 2017.

The unveiling of Viv, May 2016