Apple's Former Siri Chief Now Building SAMI For Samsung

Luc Julia was director of Apple's Siri project. This was a role he held for roughly 10 months, however he left Apple last year. Julia ended up going over to Samsung. Officially, Julia is a vice president at Samsung's innovation lab and while the natural thought would be that he is working on improvements to S-Voice, there is a bit more. Julia is actually working on something called SAMI (Samsung Architecture for Multimodal Interactions), which takes things a bit further.

In fact, SAMI was recently demonstrated by Julia as he put on a Fitbit and heart monitor and then weighed himself on a connected scale. There was also him running around the stage to mock a workout. Following this little show, Julia then asked SAMI how he was doing. This is familiar and was similar to how one would talk to Siri — "SAMI, how am I doing" was the command used.

The catch, SAMI offered a bit more in response. SAMI was able to recognize that Julia reached his exercise goals for the day. That brings the key, Siri is device specific, while SAMI looks to connect other devices. Given SAMI was able to take in the data and answer the question, this next bit likely comes with less in terms of surprise. SAMI is also able to combine that data and have it all shown on the device in one app.

Basically, this means you would not have to launch Fitbit to track your daily activity and then launch another app to check your weight progress, SAMI would be able to take it all in and present it together. Taking this a step further, there was also talk of SAMI being able to tell you to train harder or to take a break depending on your current progress. Another description of SAMI was that it is a service that links things together.

The catch here, this is not all done on the device. SAMI actually uses the data coming from the other companies. Samsung is taking the data, normalizing it and trying to present it all in a format the average user would like and/or expect. That all being said, Samsung has been working on SAMI for about six months, but things are still said to be "early stage." This has been described as being more of a "three- to-five-year project" which means that average consumer still has some time before the will see SAMI on a device.

VIA: Macworld