Samsung To Launch AI Digital Assistant Service For Galaxy S8 (reuters.com)

Samsung plans to launch an "artificial intelligence" digital assistant with its upcoming Galaxy S8 smartphone, it told Reuters. The announcement comes a month after the company acquired AI startup Viv, a voice assistant that aims to handle everyday tasks for you on its own. The company plans to incorporate this capability on its home appliances and wearable devices as well. From the report:Samsung is counting on the Galaxy S8 to help revive smartphone momentum after scrapping the fire-prone Galaxy Note 7, which will hit its profit by $5.4 billion over three quarters through the first quarter of 2017. Investors and analysts say the Galaxy S8 must be a strong device in order for Samsung to win back customers and revive earnings momentum. Samsung did not comment on what types of services would be offered through the AI assistant that will be launched on the Galaxy S8, which is expected to go on sale early next year. It said the AI assistant would allow customers to use third-party service seamlessly. "Developers can attach and upload services to our agent," said Samsung Executive Vice President Rhee Injong during a briefing, referring to its AI assistant. "Even if Samsung doesn't do anything on its own, the more services that get attached the smarter this agent will get, learn more new services and provide them to end-users with ease."

Comments

First AI question

[Virtucon]

"How do I stop my phone from catching fire Samsung?"

Re:First AI question

[tripleevenfall]

"Galexa, call the fire department and my insurance agent!"

Re:First AI question

[Maritz]

Oh, it's the guy who isn't bored by the joke yet.

Re:First AI question

[jellomizer]

It doesn't the AI will scream in pain and anguish when it is on fire.

Re:First AI question

[Virtucon]

at at same volume as the owner as it burns through your pocket? That's the feature I want to see.

Re: First AI question

[Anonymous Coward]

Does the S8 run Crysis?

Re:First AI question

[Anonymous Coward]

"How do I turn this god damn assistant thing off?"

Re:First AI question

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, another flame war started

Siri best get the popcorn, Samsung already comes with Marshmallow so its set.

Re:First AI question

[Anonymous Coward]

First answer: "Skynet startup initiated."

How about...

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop fucking up Android with even more bloatware, and instead just TRY to updated devices these morons (aka "we") already paid for??

Re:How about...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should they do that, when they can push more surveillance software onto your phone, under the guise of being a 'digital personal assistant', and make alphabet letter government agencies happy by feeding them more data (filtered by a so-called 'AI', that minimally functions to 'help' you, of course) and their marketing department and the marketing departments of their 'partner' companies being made happy with more personally-identifiable data about you supplied to them, so they can use up your bandwidth and give you even more migraine headaches than you already have by shoving orders of magnitude more shitty 'targeted' ads in your face every goddamned day?

Throw away your smartphones, get the cheapest most basic dumbphone that is still decent at being a phone, and forget this bullshit. It'll cost you less money in the long run, and your privacy will have fewer things disrespecting it. Also dismantle your new cheap dumbphone and short the GPS antenna to ground so they'll only be able to track you as accurately as what cell tower you're connected to, and keep your phone off when you're not using it. It's time for everyone to start taking control of their lives back.

Re:How about...

[ColdWetDog]

Special this week for you! Aluminum foil bulk pack with handy Mylar backing. Also try out our new line of soft, all natural cotton backed foil products!

Comfort, Styling and Paranoia.

(This message brought to you from your Samsung AI)

Re:How about...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should save some of that tinfoil for yourself. I imagine it's rather annoying, having your head in the sand all the time, and it getting into your nose and eyes; put some of that tinfoil over them before you stick your head in to hide from the reality right in front of your face.

Do you get a cold shiver whenever you hear the zipper of a Scotsman? I understand that you sheep get triggered by such things.

"I have nothing to hide, so I have nothing to fear!"

MISSING THE POINT!

People like you don't DESERVE 'freedom', because you, apparently, are only comfortable when you're on a leash. What's your address? I'm sure your wife would really appreciate a real man inside her, instead of the wimpy ersatz that you are. How much did you have to spend at the fertility clinic when they discovered your sperm count was so low you may as well have been wearing a condom, for all the likelihood she'd get pregnant from you, wuss? Congratulations, you have cognitive Klinefelter's Syndrome. Please don't exercise your right to vote tomorrow, we're all sick and tired of ineffectual, weak losers like you helping to fuck everything up, with your need for 'security', meanwhile you vote away our right to bear arms. Faggot.

Once more, Samsung misses the point

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Trying to get people to use yet another Samsung version of something that already exists in a very usable form that is NOT Samsung specific will not sell more phones. I use Google Now/Home, I have no interest in using a different personal assistant that doesn't adequately integrate with the services I already use. I'm not going to switch to Samsung versions of those services, I'll just switch to another Android brand once I need to upgrade my S6.

Re:Once more, Samsung misses the point

[Virtucon]

But Samsung wants to mine you just like Google and Apple do. That way they can provide targeted marketing opportunities and profiles to third parties. By using one service you're denying them their opportunity to mine you and that's antisocial.. ;-)

Re:Once more, Samsung misses the point

[alvinrod]

Samsung doesn't care about Android, they care about selling Samsung phones. They would rather make the money that Google is currently making from having all of those different services. There's very little profit to be made by being yet another hardware vendor, especially if you have to source components from the same suppliers as your competition. If Samsung didn't also have its own hardware division, they'd likely wind up just as unprofitable as their competitors.

They want people to start using those Samsung services and getting attached to them, so that they don't have as easy of a choice when it comes to upgrading and switching, because leaving Samsung means leaving your services. Google makes it easy to move between manufacturers with their services, but the manufacturers don't make any money as the race to the bottom continually sucks out the profit margin.

Re:Once more, Samsung misses the point

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Of course they do. I know full well Google does this, but here's the kicker. I Don't Care... because the services they provide have a value to me because they work well. Samsungs do not.

Re:Once more, Samsung misses the point

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

But they have failed with every one of the attempts they've made. S Voice: Useless. I understand their motivations, but that ship already sailed. People that are on Android and using those services are already using the Google versions of them. If they get a phone that, like the S5 did initially, tries to redirect them to an inferior service, they will return the phone and buy another brand.

Re:Once more, Samsung misses the point

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to read between the lines here.

There is a cold war going on between Samsung and Google.

The latest move from Google was the Pixel.

Google has, essentially, signalled that it intends to compete directly with other OEMs (read: Samsung) when they released the Google Pixel. Unlike the Nexus line, the Pixel is significant in that Google released specific Android features for the Pixel first, before making them available to other OEMs, and they've hinted that some features will not be released to OEMs at all in the future.

i.e., Google started building launch sites in Cuba.

However, Samsung isn't going to be caught napping. Samsung has been stockpiling "nukes" and getting ready for "war" too. Tizen, Samsung pay and now this, this stuff is Samsung's way of telling Google that, if it wants to, it can swap out Android components (or even Android itself) and use something else made in-house. Samsung is telling Google that it isn't afraid to press the big red button and, essentially, collapse the entire Android ecosystem.

Now, nobody wins by going to war. Right now, Google needs Samsung (the only profitable Android OEM, and the only one who can bring the fight to Apple) so they would lose big time if Samsung ran away from Android. Samsung is also not interested in swapping out Android because they'd have to build their own platform from scratch.

So what will happen is that Google will loosen the screws a little bit and Samsung will let it's digital assistant die a natural death. Samsung looks kinda foolish but they remain the top dog of the Android world, and that's what matters to them.

Re:Once more, Samsung misses the point

[thegarbz]

To be fail, Google Home/Now's integration into the rest of the system utterly sucks. It's great for finding out simple things like google seaches, but it's not a good technology to voice control a phone. If they can integrate it really well with their phone then we finally may be getting somewhere.

Re:Once more, Samsung misses the point

[JThundley]

The reason someone would use Samsung's assistant is because of vendor lock-in. People who buy Samsung phones will have this set as the default instead of Google Now. It was already like this on my company's Samsung phones we bought years ago. You'd hold the home button and it would ask if I wanted to complete the task with Google Now or S-Voice, which is a dumber voice-controlled assistant.

Smart assistant

[Anonymous Coward]

Will the smart assistant be smart enough to call the fire department when it catches fire?

Also, will it be called Bernie (AKA, Burny)?

Hardware longevity and self-repairability

[Anonymous Coward]

My Note 5 has been in for repair 5 times in a year, and I keep it in a tough case. My wife's Note 5 has been in twice.The worst part is that the parts needing to be fixed could easily be replaced by yours truly if I could take the phone apart!

Their phones just don't last anymore and their sealed-phone model prevents someone from keeping it too long. Apple has the same issue EXCEPT their phones outlast Samsung's.

I won't be buying another sealed phone. No thanks Samsung.

Re:Hardware longevity and self-repairability

[Anonymous Coward]

My Note 5 has survived absolutely fine, including being dropped from 5 feet, and hard enough to cause the stylus to eject out and go skittering across the floor. It was in a hard case and it shows no signs of damage. My GF's did get dropped in a soft case and break the screen. It was replaced by insurance for the same price that the new screen assembly costed.

I agree the sealed case is annoying (I would have checked to see if the ribbon cable for the screen had come loose if I could have.) But my anecdotal data says you must be having some other issues.

Exactly what part keeps getting replaced if I may ask.

Dear Samsung:

[emil]

If you want to (re)attain market leadership in phone sales, then you must:

• - Unlock all of your bootloaders,
• - Implement removable batteries in all future designs,
• - Likewise include SD-Card slots,
• - Configure Knox alarms to be cleared when your stock firmware is reloaded with Odin.

If you do not do these things, then your days of market leadership are over, and they will not return.

Warmest regards from your user community.

Re:Dear Samsung:

[Maritz]

The first two, maybe even first three, are not something that the majority of users give a fuck about. That's a shame, probably, but I think it's true.

Re:Dear Samsung:

[ColdWetDog]

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad .....

Market leadership is not trying to impress the couple of thousand anti social, remarkably tech adverse, cheapskate paranoids around here.

Look at Apple and Google. Billions in the bank. Billions of Slashdot posts complaining about the locked down Evil Bit setting.

Neither Samsung, Apple or Google care one wit about bootloaders, batteries, SD cards or niche software. Get used to it.

Re:Dear Samsung:

[110010001000]

100% correct. I'm a geek but I don't even know what "Configure Knox alarms to be cleared when your stock firmware is reloaded with Odin." is.

Re:Dear Samsung:

[iampiti]

Sadly the only thing most people will care about will be about the SD card slot.
We live in times where our ability to do things with our computers (of any size, including smartphones) is being limited ...and that's enabled by the fact that most regular joes don't care.

Re:Dear Samsung:

[CODiNE]

At least we can agree that the fourth item is in hot demand. Nothing like a Knox and Odin discussion to get a blind date going.

Re:Dear Samsung:

[jeremyp]

That's not going to work. Most of the people buying smartphones really don't care about any of that. They aren't going to retain market leadership by appealing only to a part of the Slashdot readership.

Re:Dear Samsung:

[dmesg0]

I'm not a geek, but even I know what Knox and Odin/Heimdall are.

Re:Dear Samsung:

[Anonymous Coward]

You can add one more to that list:

- 1/8" stereo headphone output

Re:Dear Samsung:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but even they know enough to ask a geek before buying new hardware. Abusing your customers always comes around to bite you, eventually. I advise a lot of people, and I do not tolerate locked bootloaders.

Re:Dear Samsung:

[Luthair]

I think most users would be interested in being able to swap batteries, at least if they still even offered them for sale at a reasonable price 2-3 years into the device. The others, including SD cards the majority of users won't care about.

Re:Dear Samsung:

[Rick Schumann]

Face it: Most people buying smartphones are about as technologically literate as your average politician, appointed official, or law enforcement officer. Why else do you think it is that they blink so much and have that confused look on their faces when you try to explain to them they're carrying around surveillance devices masquerading as a telephone? All they care about is playing their Candy Crush games and compulsively checking and posting on Facebook.

Re:Dear Samsung:

[mlts]

The bootloaders should be like Google Nexus or Pixel devices. Ship locked, but with a preference setting and a fastboot command, can be unlocked by a clued user. This way, I can install a ROM, relock the bootloader. If a bad guy steals my phone and unlocks the bootloader to try to bypass the ROM, the phone will have cleaned off the /data partition and reset.

Removable batteries are a nice thing. Beats bulky battery cases.

SD-Card slots are useful. Two would be nice, one for bolstering internal storage, and another SD card as a place for Titanium Backup to dump backups.

As for Knox E-fuses, there is a place for that, but they need to be resettable by the end user. It is the end user's phone, after all.

Re:Dear Samsung:

[Anonymous Coward]

It is the end user's phone, after all.

You're new around here, aren't you? Pro tip: every business model of every major corporation on the planet is moving towards renting or leasing hardware - they just want you to think you own it. Unless you chose the right hardware, and/or have the necessary skillz, (and possibly not even then), then you probably don't really own your phone or tablet. Sure, you have a bill of sale, and have to pay to get it repaired, and can throw it in the lake and nobody else will care. But when it comes to the features it has, the software it runs, and to whom it rats you out, increasingly you have no choice, and therefore no true ownership.

Re:Dear Samsung:

[Anonymous Coward]

Or have Angry Birds installed

Kind regards from the 99% who don't give a damn

Re:Dear Samsung:

[thegarbz]

I'm impressed. I don't think anyone could come up with a list of things consumers could care any less about than the nonsense you posted. Market leadership doesn't come from any of the above. No one except a few people on XDA developers care about Knox alarms and bootloaders, very few people outside the Slashdot readership care about batteries, and every flagship device Samsung has in their lineup at the moment already has an SD card.

I'm glad you're not in their marketing department or they'd be bankrupt now.

Re:Dear Samsung:

[thegarbz]

I think most users would be interested in being able to swap batteries

You're very out of touch with reality. Far more people care about the SD card and the ability to record HD video without hitting very low storage limits than care about their battery. The battery debate is over, practically no one outside the slashdot or hardcore geek crowd cared about the battery, and really there's no reason to anymore. The typical phone will be damaged and replaced long before their battery expires thanks to the contracting systems we have in place, and when people are low on charge they'll reach for an off the shelf USB charger which they can also use to charge their many other devices or share among other people when a hard day of Pokemoning drains the battery.

Re: Dear Samsung:

[Anonymous Coward]

The backlash of the time they tried to kill the microSD slot was enough to make them bring it back.

Re:Dear Samsung:

[Anonymous Coward]

You may want to rethink that first assertion.

Sad and lonely AI

[Anonymous Coward]

My first thought was, "Why would I want Samsung in control of my house". My second was, "Would my AI get upset that it wasn't connected to the internet and only worked in my home?".

I think I would not want it going out and connecting just to catch diseases and develop bad habits.

Spooky Prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict that like all other attempts by Samsung to duplicate existing services (app stores, S-Voice, S-Health, S-Wallet, S-blah), it will be aggressively ignored by consumers before crashing & burning.

Re:Spooky Prediction

[Maritz]

Samsung seem to be the only ones who don't see that coming.

"Hey Samsung Asistant, why is my phone melting?"

[JoeyRox]

Reply (in sexy female voice): "Because when you hold me you make me hot inside."

AI

[110010001000]

This isn't AI, or "smart". Neither is Siri, Cortana or whatever Google calls theirs. Voice recognition plus database lookups are not AI, and never will be.

Re:AI

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't just voice recognition, it's voice recognition (determining the words) and natural language processing (understanding the query). Both are fields of AI. A field of AI is not a self-aware AI entity. The problem with AI, a problem few fields have, is that it doesn't have enough distinct terms in common usage. So a digital assistant is both an AI and is also not an AI.

Re:AI

[110010001000]

Understanding a query isn't AI. Is Eliza AI? no.

First message of the AI

[Thanatiel]

Self-destruct in 5 ... 4 ...

It's going to be great!

[Gravis Zero]

I've hear the Galaxy S8 is going to be so great it's going to explode on the scene. You'll be the envy of everyone who will want to call and talk about it so your phone certain to be blowing up. Sorry, I can't help myself, I'm on fire. ;)

Too late, Samsung

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a Pixel and I'll never own another of your shovelware garbage phones again.

Re:Too late, Samsung

[Anonymous Coward]

... because now I have one of Google's shovelware garbage phones.

Al Assistant: My Vote ( Score: 1, Helpful )

[Anonymous Coward]

Question: For what presidential candidate should I vote?

The answer is simple. Let me explain.
This answer is not intended to assuage your worst fears about Donald J. Trump but will, in most cases, confirm them. Before anyone jumps on on me with claws outstretched, allow me to explain that as every grade-school student learns, it's not nice to recover the dead past by annihilating the living present. Apparently, Trump missed that day in class. Otherwise, he'd know that I don't think it would be unfair to say that some chauvinistic pedants are hopelessly nefarious. That shouldn't surprise you when you consider that once you understand his ideas, you have a responsibility to do something about them. To know, to understand, and not to act, is an egregious sin of omission. It is the sin of silence. It is the sin of letting Trump supplant one form of injustice with another.

You might think this is all pretty funny now, but I doubt I'll hear you laughing if, by next weekend, Trump is successfully able to take over society's eyes, ears, mind, and spirit. Why does he want to marginalize the traditions and truths upon which our nation's greatness sits? Because his treacheries represent a new wretched ethos that ungrateful knee-biters will eventually use to represent a threat to all the people in the area, indeed, possibly the world. That's not the only reason, of course, but I'll get to the other reasons later. Did he get dropped on his head when he was young, or did Trump take massive doses of drugs to believe that he serves as wisdom to the mighty and succor to the brave? We must doubtlessly ask ourselves questions like that before it's too late, before Trump gets the opportunity to create a climate in which it will be assumed that our achievements reflect not individual worth, talent, or skill, but special consideration.

Trump wants nothing less than to trick us into trading freedom for serfdom. His cringers then wonder, “What's wrong with that?” Well, there's not much to be done with myopic schnorrers who can't figure out what's wrong with that, but the rest of us can plainly see that Trump recently went through a Comstockism phase in which he tried repeatedly to manipulate public understanding of particularism. In fact, I'm not convinced that this phase of his has entirely passed. My evidence is that no one has a higher opinion of Trump than I, and I think Trump is an infelicific, belligerent weasel. To add another dimension to this argument, let me mention that Trump says that everything will be hunky-dory if we let him twist the history, sociology, and anthropology disseminated by our mass media and in our children's textbooks. That's his unvarying story, and it's a lie: an extremely beastly and contentious lie. Unfortunately, it's a lie that is accepted unquestioningly, uncritically, by Trump's co-conspirators.

Trump wants to keep us helpless and afraid. While none of us need to be so fearful, we are. These fears make it difficult for us to discuss the advantages of two-parent families, the essential role of individual and family responsibility, the need for uniform standards of civil behavior, and the primacy of the work ethic. This is why is critical that we talk about how sneaky fruitcakes must transition away from the infernal ideology of barbarism and learn to begin a course of careful, planned, and coordinated action. The sooner he comes to grips with that reality, the better for all of us.

What does Trump have to say about all of this? The answer, as expected, is nothing. He likes to talk about how he would sooner give up money, fame, power, and happiness than perform a snappish act. The words sound pretty until you read between the lines and see that Trump is secretly saying that he intends to cast dissent as treason and criticism as espionage. For your edification, I should point out that idle hands are the devil's tools. That's why Trump spends his leisure time devising ever more mischievous ways to pass of

Re: Al Assistant: My Vote ( Score: 1, Helpful )

[tripleevenfall]

TLDR

Re: Al Assistant: My Vote ( Score: 1, Helpful )

[Anonymous Coward]

Best answer to all that; Trump is not Clinton, who is a corrupt politician, who wants larger number of dependents(be it a permanent under class or ever more economic immigrants) on a welfare state to ever increase power of her kind for ever longer, and a mass murdering war monger, who needs ever more resources to loot from other countries, to keep up the welfare state and keep the financial elite happy with bigger cuts of the loot.

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batteries

[emil]

• - Users certainly care about batteries at the end of the service life, and would rather not purchase a new phone because of the failure of a $10 component. The more expensive the phone, the more frustration when this point is reached.
• - Users also certainly care about photos or other media on a damaged phone, the extraction of which is greatly complicated by the lack of an SD-Card.

Re:batteries

[thegarbz]

Users certainly care about batteries at the end of the service life, and would rather not purchase a new phone because of the failure of a $10 component. The more expensive the phone, the more frustration when this point is reached.

No they don't. End of service life is just another term for I'm getting another phone for nothing just like I did my previous one because that's the way contracts work. I have yet to see a single person who's phone failed because of a $10 component that wasn't the result of something obviously bad like catching fire, or bulging and breaking the phone apart. Sales figures have very clearly shown that this doesn't even rank remotely in consumer interest.

Re:batteries

[GNious]

• - Users certainly care about batteries at the end of the service life, and would rather not purchase a new phone because of the failure of a $10 component. The more expensive the phone, the more frustration when this point is reached.

This is an issue that occurs well after the device is bought, and doesn't figure into the purchasing for the vast majority of people.

It's all about interoperability

[omnichad]

Google's is nice, but only because I use Google for my calendar and some email. What's the use case for Samsung?

Personal digital assistants will only have a limited use as long as there's no interconnected API. Right now, you can make your app respond via Google Now - but a whole world exists outside your phone. It needs to be as easy as OAuth to link up and register concepts/hooks.

Sure that will work.

[emil]

Technical reviews of Samsung phones are now of (yet another) walled-garden that is horribly tended due to the vendor neglect of Android.

If Samsung relents, and allows their remarkably poor-quality code to be wiped, then technical reviews immediately improve. With market opinion eventually come sales.

This also involves Samsung growing a backbone against Verizon. That will never happen, so the stock price will continue to tank. More explosions might accelerate the effect.

The hottest gadget of the season

[OneHundredAndTen]

Without any doubt, this is going to be the hottest gadget this quarter. After all, Samsung is on fire, and its products are the most explosive success ever.

Ringtone?

[meglon]

Apparently it comes with a ringtone from Springteen's "I'm On Fire."

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