Samsung buys AI firm Fluently to refresh voice-assistant Bixby
Samsung has bought artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot firm Fluently to boost its voice-assistant Bixby. Fluently's chatbot integrates with messaging services to offer natural, contextually relevant automated responses. The acquisition follows Samsung's previous purchase of US-based AI firm Viv, which was co-founded by the team that created Apple's Siri.

Samsung's not giving up on Bixby, despite initial lukewarm responses to its AI assistant.

Bixby is the South Korean firm's answer to other voice assistants like Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa. But when it debuted, fans found it just wasn't as smart as the competition.

To buff up Bixby's brains, Samsung has now acquired Fluently(opens in a new tab), which makes an AI chatbot that can compose smart replies in English and Korean.

Fluently produced an app that plugged into messengers like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, and offered natural-sounding contextual responses.

Respond to friends with a tap. Credit: fluently

Similar to Gmail's auto responder, Fluently reads an incoming message, and tries to offer you a selection of appropriate reactions.

The Fluently acquisition adds onto Samsung's 2016 buyout of US-based AI platform Viv, which was co-founded by the team that created Siri.

To be fair to Bixby, it's a lot younger than the competition. And the Viv team didn't contribute to the current version of Bixby either, so it's safe to say that the injection of all this new expertise will help Bixby close the gap a lot sooner.