Samsung to make all its smart devices AI-ready by 2020

Samsung is planning to make all its appliances artificial intelligence capable by 2020. The company's new consumer electronics CEO Kim Hyun-suk told The Wall Street Journal, "I wonder why everyone is talking about speakers," remarked Kim in reference to smart speaker segment.

Smart speaker segment is the fastest-growing category of consumer electronics, according to many industry trackers. While the South Korean giant is already working on its first Bixby-powered smart speaker, it will see the light of day in the second half of the year. But the company has bigger plans for all of its products by making them AI-ready.

Samsung currently sells half a billion consumer-grade electronic products every year and Kim sees all those products to be potential smart speakers. However, it's unlikely that the products launched before 2020 will have AI capabilities. The company sees Bixby and AI is the major selling point of its connected home ecosystem. A full-fledged AI ecosystem allowing smart devices to communicate with each other would also help the company compete with Amazon and Google in the smart speaker segment.

Mr. Kim also said that while Samsung's smart home push will be focused on Bixby, the company remains open to collaboration with Google, Apple, and other tech giants with digital assistants of their own.

Besides, Samsung seems to be exploring an uncharted territory with its new content-dependent somatosensory output. At least that's what the new patent filing suggests. Basically, the idea here is to develop a wearable that could simulate a wearer's somatic senses like pressure, wind, and temperature.

Samsung plans to achieve this with a special device which appears to be a tablet. This device can generate ultrasonic frequency templates that are thought to activate somatosensory activity. The device will create those templates based on what content the user is engaging with. The templates will then be sent to an external wearable which looks like a pair of headphones. This will allow the wearer to feel whatever's happening in the content.

The drawings that the company has included in the patent explain how it expects the system to work. The headphones will have an array of ultrasonic speakers along the length of a headband. The headband targets different region of the brain.