Apple’s Former Director Works on Samsung’s New Innovative App

Luc Julia, former director behind the team which worked on Apple's Siri voice service, is said to be working with rival company Samsung, on a new project dubbed 'SAMI'.

SAMI, an online service, will be able to provide an aggregate data from wearable computers, "smart home" devices, cars and others as normalised feed to users.

"We're doing this normalization and delivering the data through an API, because people don't want to learn all the APIs for all the individual products," stated Julia, now the vice president at Samsung's Open Innovation Center.

Julia is also said to have tested the technology by generating data on various fitness trackers attached to his body and getting the accumulated result in a single app, reported Apple Insider.

The system, which is said to feature a Siri-like virtual assistant, was revealed when Julia, during his workout session for gathering the data asked, "SAMI, how am I doing?" to which the app responded that he has reached his fitness goal for the day.

SAMI, though being similar to Siri, is very much different as it will fetch the aggregated data through different devices unlike Siri, which fetches iOS-only data. Samsung is believed to work in coordination with different partners for the application which includes Fitbit, Pebble, Withings and others. A total of 50 firms are a part of developing and testing SAMI.

It is being speculated that Samsung might have to face some difficulties in making the software for SAMI as the tech firm is more hardware-focussed. "It's something Samsung doesn't know very well today, because Samsung is a hardware company," Julia added. "But we want to enter the space, and offer something different from iCloud."