Samsung's NEON website goes live, still leaves us confused

Samsung’s website for their virtual “friend” NEON has gone live.

The site touts an “artificial human” that “looks and behaves like a real human, with the ability to show emotions and intelligence.” The virtual being will reportedly not respond to “Hey NEON”, but rather to a specific name such as “Frank, Natasha, Hana.”

The site notes NEON will not be a virtual assistant like Alexa, but rather a friend that can “connect and learn more about us, gain new skills, and evolve.” NEON will support multiple languages, from Spanish to Japanese.

Samsung makes much of the fact that the NEON avatar will be extremely responsive with “lifelike reality that is beyond our normal perception to distinguish” and that users will be able to interact with smiles and chit chat.

Crucially for a digital friend, Samsung says privacy and trust are built-in by design.

From the above, it suggests Samsung is working on virtual friend technology similar to Replika , which touts itself as “The AI companion who cares.” Replika is relatively popular, with more than 1 million downloads on Android, and a product by Samsung may be more so.

We await more details from Samsung’s demo today.  In the meantime check out Samsung’s NEON.life website here.