Ironically, I got a contact from a recruiter at Viv recently, and my main concern was that I didn't see how they could succeed unless they were bought by someone else. Either "intelligent assistants" are going to be a fad, or they're going to be a built-in feature: in the first case, the point is moot; in the second, standalone assistants like Viv was will go the way of standalone grammar checkers, i.e., either get bought and integrated or wither away. I agree that the open platform idea just wouldn't be viable; Viv would have to be so much better than Siri or Google Now that users would be willing to not just download it but use it in preference to the fully-integrated AI that came with their device.

Samsung doesn't strike me as a great place to end up, but I suspect they were the only place to end up, practically speaking. It'll be interesting to see if they can really compete against Google Now, though.