Samsung Galaxy S8 to get AI Assistant

Samsung Electronics Co Ltd said it would launch an artificial intelligence digital assistant service for its upcoming Galaxy S8 smartphone, seeking to rebound from the Galaxy Note 7’s collapse and differentiate its devices. The world’s top smartphone maker in October announced the acquisition of Viv Labs Inc, a firm run by a co-creator of Apple Inc’s Siri voice assistant programme. Samsung plans to integrate the San Jose-based company’s AI platform, called Viv, into the Galaxy smartphones and expand voice-assistant services to home appliances and wearable technology devices. Samsung is counting on the Galaxy S8 to help revive smartphone momentum after the discontinuation of fire-prone Galaxy Note 7s, 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 In-jong 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.
Report Technology firms are locked in an increasingly heated race to make AI good enough to let consumers interact with their devices more naturally, especially via voice. Alphabet Inc’s Google is widely considered to be the leader in AI, but others including Amazon.com, Apple and Microsoft Corp have launched their own offerings including voice-powered digital assistants.

Samsung Buys Artificial Intelligence Startup to Enhance Virtual Assistant

With the aim to bolster its virtual personal assistants to deliver an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based ecosystem across its devices and services, Samsung Electronics has acquired Viv Labs, an AI start-up. Viv was founded by Dag Kittlaus, Adam Cheyer and Chris Brigham who were part of the original virtual assistant Siri team that Apple bought in 2010. Viv has developed a unique, open AI platform that gives third-party developers the power to use and build conversational assistants and integrate a natural language-based interface into renowned applications and services, Samsung said in a statement on Friday. "Unlike other existing AI-based services, Viv has a sophisticated natural language understanding, machine learning capabilities and strategic partnerships that will enrich a broader service ecosystem," said Injong Rhee, Chief Technical Officer of the Mobile Communications business at Samsung Electronics." Viv was built with both consumers and developers in mind. This dual focus is also what attracted us to Viv as an ideal candidate to integrate with Samsung home appliances, wearables and more," Rhee added. With Viv, Samsung will be able to unlock and offer new service experiences for its customers, including one that simplifies user interfaces, understands the context of the user and offers the user the most appropriate and convenient suggestions and recommendations.
As part of the acquisition, the Viv founding team will work closely with Samsung's Mobile Communications business but continue to operate independently under its existing leadership. With the rise of AI, consumers now desire an interaction with technology that is conversational, personalised and contextual. To achieve this, Viv has developed a new and proprietary platform that allows this interaction to scale.

Microsoft announces GA of Dynamics 365 with AI features

Microsoft is the latest to trumpet its AI capabilities for sales people with the general availability of Dynamics 365 coming on November 1st.
Microsoft announced last summer that it was going to be combining its ERP and CRM into a unified solution, and this is the culmination of that announcement. Like many large organizations, Microsoft tends to deliver the news in waves — it’s coming, it’s in beta, it’s here.

While the news smacks Microsoft points out it has been working on AI long before its biggest competitors like Salesforce and Oracle, which recently announced their own AI capabilities at their respective customer customer conferences, Dreamforce and Oracle Open World.

Microsoft has built in a couple of intelligence features into the release designed specifically for sales and service personnel. First, there is Customer Insights, a stand-alone cloud service, which enables users to bring in a variety of internal and external data sources. Companies can integrate all of this data with internal metrics (KPIs) to drive automated actions based on the data. The solution includes partner data from the likes of Facebook and Trip Advisor (proving you don’t need to own an external data source to take advantage of it).

It’s been designed as a stand-alone service that can work with any of the Dynamics 365 CRM components — sales, customer service or field service — and can also work with any external CRM tool with open APIs. This last point is particularly telling because it’s giving customers who might not be using Dynamics 365 (but are using other Microsoft tools like Outlook) access to this feature.
The second piece is called Relationship Insights, which as the name suggests gives sales people information about the status of their customer relationships at any given moment. It’s built on the on the Cortana Intelligence Suite, which Microsoft introduced in 2015 and uses tools like sentiment analysis to check on the likelihood of the deal closing and the next best action to take.
Microsoft brings new AI-powered features to Office 365 and Dynamics 365
Microsoft gives Salesforce a shove with new Dynamics 365 integrated cloud platform.
A new sales technology stack is coming
Salesforce Einstein delivers artificial intelligence across the Salesforce platform If this sounds familiar, it should because it’s very similar to what we’ve been hearing over the last month from a variety of CRM vendors. While you might legitimately wonder why sales and service people are the recipients of all the wonder that is AI in the enterprise, it seems like a reasonable starting point to improve the likelihood of making sales and understanding your customers better, an increasingly important capability in the mobile-social-cloud age.

It’s important to remember that we are really just at the rudimentary beginnings of where this type of technology could eventually take us. Over time we will see this intelligence added to bots (and other delivery methods) to hide the complexity of the underlying software and guide users to an answer or solution. The idea is to increase our productivity over time, although we are a long way from achieving that goal just yet.

For now, know that Microsoft has consolidated its artificial intelligence tools into a single, coherent division and just about every vendor — not just those selling CRM — is trying to build some level of intelligence into its products. Dynamics 365 is just the latest manifestation.