According to the Galaxy S8 rumors, Samsung is apparently said to be looking to utilize its acquisition of Viv Labs by integrating the company’s AI into the phone, thus giving Samsung devices a voice assistant that would provide some form of competition to existing solutions, like Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, Alexa, and etc.
However those plans could be shelved, according to Edison Investment Research analyst Richard Windsor (via The Register), who claims that Google might have prevented Samsung from doing so in favor of keeping Google Assistant as the main (and only) voice assistant for Android. Apparently this is said to be part of the deal for Samsung to use the Android platform, so unless Samsung plans on dumping Android, they’ll have no choice but to give in.
Even if it does, it has been suggested that perhaps due to restrictions on Android, Samsung wouldn’t be able to get Viv to function meaningfully. This is actually not the first time that Samsung and Google have clashed when it comes to what can and cannot be done on Android devices.
While it has never been confirmed, in the past we have heard how Samsung was forced to scale back on their Android customizations, so this doesn’t really come as too much of a surprise.
