Samsung has just made a big-deal hire for its Internet of Things (IoT) initiative. Luc Julia, the former engineer who spearheaded Apple’s Siri development, is now working for the mobile developer as vice president of Samsung's innovation lab. Julia brings to the table SAMI (Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions), an online service, which will be able to provide an aggregate data from wearable computers, smart home devices and other M2M technologies.
"We're doing this normalization and delivering the data through an API, because people don't want to learn all the APIs for all the individual products," stated Julia, now the vice president at Samsung's Open Innovation Center.
The idea is to collect data from different devices (which otherwise will be displayed in standalone apps and will be processed to be presented in a single app). A big benefit of the new effort will be to “be able to collect and store data from any device in its original format,” says Julia.
Julia showed the technology at the MEMS Executive Congress in Napa, Calif., an event for companies that make sensors for smartphones and other devices.
To demonstrate the service, Julia showed how SAMI might be used to build a personal health service. He wore a Fitbit and a wearable heart monitor, weighed himself on an Internet-connected scale, then ran around the stage a few times. When asked, "SAMI, how am I doing?" the app responded that he had reached his goal for the day.
It should be no surprise that there are similarities between SAMI and Siri; both collect data from a variety of services and deliver them through a single app. The difference here is Siri is exclusive to Apple, while SAMI is designed to be used by many companies, not just Samsung.
Technological advances have made speech recognition software and devices more functional and user friendly, with most contemporary products performing tasks with over 90 percent accuracy.
With the advent of Siri, a recent survey revealed that many are simply underwhelmed.
After the launch of iOS 7, Apple updated its Siri Web pages to drop all references to the product being in beta. Since then, Apple has worked to refine the voice-enabled personal assistant to make it faster, more accurate and more consistent, however 46 percent of those surveyed by Intelligent Voice feel the service is “oversold.”
“Voice recognition is an emerging technology that’s been emerging for 30 years,” said Intelligent Voice CTO Nigel Cannings, in a statement. “We need to be careful that we sell what is possible, and it seems we’re not doing that. ‘Star Trek’ communication with computers is still a long way off.”
It’s a matter of time before we see how well SAMI competes against Apple’s Siri.
Edited by
Rachel Ramsey
