With the launch of Bixby and reports that Samsung is building its own competitor to Amazon’s Echo, the consumer electronics giant has now made an acquisition that could help power its next generation of voice-powered services.
Samsung has acquired Innoetics, a startup out of Greece that has developed text-to-speech and voice-to-speech technology that can, among other things, listen to a person speaking, train on what that person is saying, and then read out a piece of completely unrelated text in that same voice.
“Samsung has agreed to acquire Innoetics,” the company told us in an emailed statement in response to our questions. “Samsung is always exploring ways to deepen our relationships with companies like Innoetics whose technologies present an opportunity to strengthen Samsung’s capabilities.”
Innoetics had been working primarily on B2B services up to now, with telcos and other businesses using its tech by way of a set of APIs. Innoetics has now posted a note on on the homepage of its website announcing that these B2B services have now been discontinued .
It’s not clear yet what Samsung plans to do with the tech, but according to one person, “it is perfectly suited for consumer services.”
In other words, we could see it working with Bixby, or a new piece of hardware, or something for Samsung’s extensive mobile handset business, or all of the above. Or something else entirely different, given Samsung’s reach into so many other areas of consumer electronics. In any case, Samsung plans to keep Innoetics and its 8-10 employees (the higher number includes contractors) based in Athens as a subsidiary of its wider business coffee maker.
Terms of the deal — which officially closed last Friday — have not been disclosed, but we understand that it’s one of the bigger exits for a tech startup in Greece. Sources tell us that Innoetics went for less than the amount Daimler paid for Taxibeat, an Uber rival that it acquired earlier this year for around €40 million ($43 million).
Samsung acquiring Innoetics follows other acquisitions it has made in the area of voice-based technology — namely, in October last year, Samsung bought the personal assistant startup Viv, which it used to help build Bixby.
Samsung has incubated and acquired other kinds of tech, too, such as its recent move to pick up VRB, a VR startup that it funded and incubated by Samsung’s emerging technology investment and development arm Samsung Next, which was also behind the acquisition of Viv and, now, Innoetics.
(Other recent acquisitions of natural-language startups have included Baidu buying Seattle’s Kitt.ai last week.)
Innoetics started as a spinout from the Athena Research and Innovation Center, a research institute in Athens that includes a department focused on speech and language processing. The Athena RIC announced the acquisition itself. We have also contacted Samsung for a comment 楊婉儀幼稚園

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