Well, no, not exactly.But it appears that Nuance Communications, the company that developed the technology behind Siri, as well as Nina, Nuance's own natural language assistant, and Dragon Naturally Speaking, is talking with Samsung about a possible acquisition, according to the Wall Street Journal. WSJ writes:
The Burlington, Mass., company has recently spoken about a possible sale of the company with Samsung Electronics Co., and private-equity firms, some of the people said. It isn't clear where sale talks, some of which happened earlier this year, currently stand or if they will lead to a deal.Were this sale to go through, it would likely have no immediate impact on Apple, but the long term impacts are unclear. In spite of numerous lawsuits, Samsung and Apple continue to cooperate in some areas, with Samsung supplying chips for certain Apple products. There have also been reports that Apple has already moved future Siri development in-house, reducing or eliminating it's future dependencies on Nuance.If nothing else, Samsung's interest in Nuance can be interpreted as yet another sign that Samsung wants to become a complete competitor to Google and Apple, and not just an OEM producing yet another series of Android phones. Samsung appears dedicated to eventually owning the entire ecosystem for it's devices. See our prior article about Samsung's Tizen OS for more on this line of thought.