Samsung Taps Former Siri Head To Stake Claim To The Internet Of Things

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What do you think of Siri? Laughable gimmick, or revolutionary interface of the future? Your answer to that question may well determine how excited you get about this: the engineer who oversaw Siri is now at Samsung, building their own Internet of Things API.

At a conference in San Francisco on Friday, Luc Julia, Samsung’s vice president of innovation lab, showed off SAMI. Sound familiar? SAMI — which stands for Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions — is a platform that collects data from any connected devices, including wearables like the Galaxy Gear, and then makes that data available to other devices.

Macworld has a good write-up of what SAMI can do:

To demonstrate the service, Julia showed how SAMI might be used to build a personal health service. He donned a Fitbit and a wearable heart monitor, weighed himself on an Internet-connected scale, then ran around the stage a few times by way of putting himself through an exercise routine.

He showed how data from the devices, which is normally viewed in standalone apps, can be collected by SAMI, processed, and then presented to the user in the form of a single app.

In Siri-like fashion, he also asked the service, “SAMI, how am I doing?” The app told him he had reached his exercise goal for the day. The idea is that it could do more sophisticated analysis, such as telling him when he needs to train harder or take a break.

It’s not surprising that Samsung is working on this. The Internet of Things is a big buzzword right now, but there are no standards holding it together. Every company — including Apple — is going to want it to be the internet of their things. Samsung, as usual, is going first, but will Apple go best?

Source: Macworld

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