One of Siri’s original founders, Dag Kittlaus, left Apple a few years ago and started a new thing, Viv. I’ve actually been watching this one pretty closely. While Viv is still in development, I’ve always felt it may be something pretty nifty. Maybe it was a reaction to escaping from the Apple yoke but it seemed as if the team behind Viv was set on keeping it platform agnostic.

That’s no longer the case. A few days ago Samsung acquired Viv. Word is that Viv will remain an independent company but will only develop Viv for Samsung phones. (It will be curious to see if they rebrand the name.)

Increasingly, lines are being drawn. Apple has Siri. Google has Google Assistant. And now Samsung will have Viv. It looks like we’re going to have less competition on individual platforms but instead competition between platforms. I don’t think the idea of digital assistants is going away anytime soon. But that’s about all we can be sure of. How this all plays out or even what exactly a digital assistant does in a few years is anyone’s guess right now.