Samsung Pushes Ahead With Galaxy S8

Samsung Electronics said on Sunday it will offer an artificial intelligence assistant service in the upcoming flagship smartphone, as the South Korean firm seeks recovery from its global smartphone and washing machine recalls.

The Galaxy S8 will let users order food or perform other tasks without going through a third-party application by simply asking the phone’s virtual assistant, Samsung said in a statement.

The artificial intelligence service will also be made available in Samsung’s other consumer electronics products, such as refrigerators.

The company declined to disclose what specific tasks the S8 phone will perform through its artificial intelligence feature, AP reported on November 6.

Samsung is expected to unveil the next iteration for its flagship Galaxy device in spring, but some say earlier. Sales of the Galaxy S8 will be crucial for the recovery of Samsung’s mobile business, which saw its latest quarterly profit nearly wiped out by two global recalls of the Galaxy Note 7 smartphone.

The South Korean company estimates it has lost at least $5.3 billion as it discontinued the model, which overheated and caught fire.

The company said last month that it has not figured out what went wrong with the Note 7 phones.

It joined the race to create the digital assistant service when it acquired in October Viv Labs Inc., a Silicon Valley startup launched by the same entrepreneurs who sold Siri to Apple.

Past and current Samsung phones offer a voice assistant service called “S Voice” developed internally, but the feature did not gain much traction.

Samsung’s acquisition of the Silicon Valley firm was seen as it is taking another step to seek independence from Google, which offers its brand of virtual assistant service in Android-powered devices.

Executives at Samsung and Viv Labs said the biggest difference between the existing digital assistant and the one they are jointly developing is that the latter will be an “open AI platform”, meaning that third-party developers will be able to offer their services through Samsung’s AI platform.

“Our Galaxy smartphones don’t provide services that enable consumers to order pizza or coffee, but does provide third-party applications. But the new AI platform will enable consumers to do things that they would usually do through a separate third-party application,” Samsung’s statement said.