To Pixel or not to Pixel, that is the question.

[superchunk]

LurkerJ said:

Samsung just acquired Viv, the new voice assistant that made headlines months ago because it's developed by the creators of Siri. It's fantastic, check it out.

Siri was better when it launched than it is now in my opinion, Apple just didn't give the team the freedom they wanted back then because Apple is so anal about "privacy" of its users, so they left and started again from scratch Viv. The fun fact now is that Apple acknowledges that it messed up and heavily stunted Siri growth and they are trying to fix it, one can't help but wonder what Siri would be like as of now if the original team remained with Apple and continued developing Siri without restrictions.

I guess this is it then for Samsung, they clearly will not be using Google's assistant, this also means that Microsoft's dreams of making Cortona the default voice assistant on Android devices can be put to rest.

This is also why Google moved to put out its own high-end phones. The biggest Android distributor has continuously made steps to define the Android experience. Samsung has continuously put out software that directly replaces core areas of Android including the previous voice support, Pay, etc. They also have their own OS (Tizen) that is continuously developed upon. I expect at some point Samsung will quietly replace their touchwiz'd Android experience with Tizen, or at least they want to, and are possibly still resolving how they do that without killing off support of Play store / apps. Losing that would kill its support (big reasons why blackberry and windows phones failed).

Basically, Google needed to create its own premier experience to ensure their vision of Android was a known product and not being taken over by Samsung's own aspirations.