With the launch of Bixby and reports that Samsung is building its own competitor to Amazon’s Echo, the consumer electronics giant has now made an acquisition that could help power its next generation of voice-powered services.
Samsung has acquired Innoetics, a startup out of Greece that has developed text-to-speech and voice-to-speech technology that can, among other things, listen to a person speaking, train on what that person is saying, and then read out a piece of completely unrelated text in that same voice.
“Samsung has agreed to acquire Innoetics,” the company told us in an emailed statement in response to our questions. “Samsung is always exploring ways to deepen our relationships with companies like Innoetics whose technologies present an opportunity to strengthen Samsung’s capabilities.&rdquo Managed Private Network ;
Innoetics had been working primarily on B2B services up to now, with telcos and other businesses using its tech by way of a set of APIs. Innoetics has now posted a note on on the homepage of its website announcing that these B2B services have now been discontinued.
It’s not clear yet what Samsung plans to do with the tech, but according to one person, “it is perfectly suited for consumer services.”
In other words, we could see it working with Bixby, or a new piece of hardware, or something for Samsung’s extensive mobile handset business, or all of the above. Or something else entirely different, given Samsung’s reach into so many other areas of consumer electronics. In any case, Samsung plans to keep Innoetics and its 8-10 employees (the higher number includes contractors) based in Athens as a subsidiary of its wider business wine buff<.
Terms of the deal — which officially closed last Friday — have not been disclosed, but we understand that it’s one of the bigger exits for a tech startup in Greece. Sources tell us that Innoetics went for less than the amount Daimler paid for Taxibeat, an Uber rival that it acquired earlier this year for around €40 million ($43 million).
Samsung acquiring Innoetics follows other acquisitions it has made in the area of voice-based technology — namely, in October last year, Samsung bought the personal assistant startup Viv, which it used to help build Bixby.
Samsung has incubated and acquired other kinds of tech, too, such as its recent move to pick up VRB, a VR startup that it funded and incubated by Samsung’s emerging technology investment and development arm Samsung Next, which was also behind the acquisition of Viv and, now, Innoetics.
(Other recent acquisitions of natural-language startups have included Baidu buying Seattle’s Kitt.ai last week.)
Innoetics started as a spinout from the Athena Research and Innovation Center, a research institute in Athens that includes a department focused on speech and language processing. The Athena RIC announced the acquisition itself. We have also contacted Samsung for a comment.
Notably, Innoetics was completely bootstrapped since being founded in 2006 by Aimilios Chalamandaris, Pirros Tsiakoulis, Sotiris Karabetsos, and Spyros Raptis. The company had actually been in the process of getting rebooted and was seeking VC funding when it first started talking to Samsung. Initially, conversations started around a potential partnership before the two entered into acquisition talks Interactive Table.
We have seen a huge boom in voice-powered technology, from personal assistants — not just Bixby, but Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and many more — to hardware like Google Home and Amazon’s Echo range, all of which are using innovations in machine learning and other AI tools, as well as advances in natural language processing, to become more and lifelike and useful.
Innoetics’ technology is an interesting complement to all of this. Many services today are built around single languages before getting adapted, slowly, to more; and they are all basically built around one familiar voice (recall the hot pursuit that finally found the “voice of Siri“). Innoetics currently supports not one but 19 different languages, including English and (naturally) Greek, German and several dialects of Hindi.
“The team has amazing foundational technology in text-to-speech,” says Kostas Mallios, an ex-Microsoftie from Seattle who had started working with the company six months ago as an advisor and ended up helping lead the sale to Samsung. He said Innoetics has “huge capabilities” to increase the languages covered by its tech, and was on track to double or even triple the base. “Their synthesized voices are so accurate you almost can’t tell the difference between it and the real voice.”
Longer term, this may also raise security questions, of course: the smarter AI gets, the more likely it is that malicious hackers and others might use it for nefarious ends, and one of those ends could be in areas like identity theft. Tracking and mimicking people’s voices could be an obvious component of that.
“As synthesized voice has become more human sounding, security is something that will need to be dealt with,” Mallois said. “We’re not quite there yet but I can guarantee that large companies are thinking about how to address that, too.”
死對於她來說並不陌生。
死亡這個暗的詞彙，她也並不害怕。她甚至於想探索死亡的滋味。
對她來說，失去和離開比死亡還可怕。可怕到她睡覺時也忍不住牢牢抓住被淚水落濕的枕巾。
曾經多少人，用“死亡”這兩個字為理由，離開了她。
只剩下她一個人，靜靜地，摸著冰冷的石碑。
她九歲那年，第一次明白了“死”的概念。
那年，爺爺離開她去了另外一個世界。她在這個世界，試圖用眼淚觸摸這兩個世界的距離。
再後來，她的妹妹和媽媽，也相繼離開。都相繼在車輪的碾壓下，和她分割開來。她不知道該怎麼形容。
她感覺很可笑。
上帝本來就是不公平的，他給你關上一扇門之後，還會順便帶上一扇窗。
她想自己打開，卻那麼難。
無數次地在葬禮牧師的聲音裡面聽到死亡的味道。可怕的暗，滲透人心。她很想就那麼靜靜地坐在土堆上，去陪那些不負責任地離開自己的人。
他說，他會一直陪著她，不會走。
當她還是一個小丫頭，就那麼笑了，笑得咯咯咯的。香港酒店推荐
她說，我當然知道啦，你會當一個對我最好的人。
她開心地躺在他懷裡面，笑得那麼甜。
而現在，她木木地撐著色雨傘，站在靈堂外，看著裡面哭號的阿叔阿嬸。
眼淚，都流不下來了。
乾澀的眼眶，酸澀地發疼。
淅淅瀝瀝的小雨灑在雨傘上，發出沙沙的聲音。輕輕敲打著她的心。
你不是說，會一直陪著我嗎，不會走嗎。svenson史雲遜護髮中心
會永遠永遠，陪著我。
可是你還是走了啊。
我還要來送你……參加你的葬禮？
你不覺得這很可笑嗎。
她閉上眼睛，不看靈堂裡面他的遺像。
你也走了……你們都騙我。都走了……
在這之前，其實她是一直都不怕參加葬禮的。在她看來，葬禮只是一個形式而已。人的靈魂，隨著葬禮的開始灰飛煙滅。
可是，現在她才發現，原來，參加葬禮，不是怕不怕的問題。
而是累不累。
只是害怕接受再見這句話。心涼是什麼，不是憤怒不是失望而是再見，一句再見兩個世界 。
她靜靜地站在那裡。
小雨，淅淅瀝瀝地灑在傘上。
她不想發出聲音。
她在無聲地叫他。
夜在天空撕開一道無盡的口子。
她終於輕呼出聲，
爸……爸爸……
我來看你了。
她說過了她不害怕死亡。她只是害怕再見和拋棄。
她和他……
在葬禮上見面了。Pretty renew 傳銷