THE Crab (virtual assistant present in Apple's operating systems), for those who don't know, it was not a project developed internally, but the result of an acquisition by Ma.
Shortly after the acquisition (more specifically one day after the launch of the iPhone 4s, which brought the virtual assistant as a great novelty), however, Dag Kittlaus (one of Siri's co-founders alongside Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham) left Apple and embarked in a new venture. At the time, we even joked:
Kittlaus's exit had been planned for a while and was totally friendly. One of the reasons for this is that his family lives in Chicago, so the executive wanted to take the time to enjoy it and start to come up with ideas for new ventures, who knows, maybe some other revolutionary that may be acquired by Apple in a few years? 😛
Time passed and Kittlaus created a sturdier Siri, called Viv. Its great differentials are: a totally interconnected nature and the programmatic character of the systems backend (using “advances” in the synthesis of programs, Viv's artificial intelligence is able to write its own code to perform new tasks). #be afraid
Guess what happened! No, Apple didn’t buy Viv, who did it was Samsung.
According to TechCrunch, Viv continues to function as an independent company; obviously, offering Samsung services and their platforms. The value of the business was not disclosed.
According to Jacopo Lenzi (senior vice president at Samsung), "this is an acquisition that is being made by the mobile team, but we clearly see interest in all of our devices". He also said that "from our point of view and that of the customer, the interest and power of this really comes from taking advantage of Samsung's overall scale, as well as the wealth of contact points we have with consumers." Taking into account that Samsung creates and markets not only smartphones but a huge range of products (including washing machines, refrigerators and everything else), a powerful assistant like Viv makes a lot of sense if we think about the new forms of interaction that exist today.
Despite this, of course, it is still an answer Siri (Apple) and Google Assistant, which will be integrated with the Pixel smartphone (the new line of phones from Google).
Apple, of course, is not standing still. Recently, the company made a very interesting investment in the area by acquiring the startup English VocalIQ. Regardless of that (and assessing everything in a superficial way), it seems to me that Tim Cook's company missed a great opportunity.
