In its mission to further improve Bixby, Samsung has acquired artificial intelligence startup Kngine. It has taken a 100 percent stake in the company that has developed an artificial intelligence search engine which can understand and answer questions as well as perform relevant actions.
Samsung acquires Kngine
Kngine started its operations back in Egypt back in 2013. The company details on its website that its artificial intelligence engine crawls the web, enterprise documents, books, FAQs and even customer service logs to create “biologically plausible knowledge representations,” which basically means that the AI strives to function like a human brain.
It first understands the questions and then breaks them down into sub-questions and dependencies before forming a solution plan. It then searches its knowledge graph which combines knowledge from countless documents to find possible answers before surfacing the most plausible answer to the query.
A Samsung official revealed to The Investor that the company's venture capital unit Samsung Next had actually invested in Kngine jointly with Vodafone Ventures Egypt in 2014. Samsung Research America later acquired a 100 percent stake in the company last year.
This isn't the first acquisition of its kind. Samsung has been picking up smaller artificial intelligence companies recently some of which include Expect Labs and Vicarious. These acquisitions are in line with its efforts to advance artificial intelligence solutions.
