YEREVAN, OCTOBER 6, ARMENPRESS. Samsung Electronics Co. said Thursday that it will buy U.S. artificial intelligence company Viv Labs Inc., as the South Korean smartphone giant turns to the creators of Apple Inc.’s Siri service to beef up its own mobile software and services, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The deal, for an undisclosed amount, is Samsung’s fourth U.S. technology company acquisition in a little more than two years, underscoring the technology player’s new willingness to look outside the company to spur innovation, particularly in areas like software, where it has traditionally been weak.

The aim for Samsung is to pack its phones with more eye-popping features to help its premium devices stand out from a pack of competitors, including Apple’s iPhones.

After its acquisition last year of mobile payments startup LoopPay for about $160 million, Samsung adopted the Burlington, Mass.-based company’s technology to launch Samsung Pay, a mobile payment service that rivals Apple Pay.

Samsung is looking to follow a similar model with San Jose, Calif.-based Viv Labs, which was founded four years ago by a team that includes Siri co-creators Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer.

Unlike with Siri, which Kittlaus sold to Apple in 2010 before departing the company the next year, Kittlaus took an open-development approach with Viv Labs, allowing third-party developers to contribute new functions and features to the Viv virtual-assistant service.

“Siri and some of the other assistants are Chapter One,” Kittlaus said in an interview, calling Viv’s open model “the missing ingredient to take this to a completely different level.”

In contrast to Siri, which can offer what Mr. Kittlaus described as “dozens” of features, he said that Viv Labs would allow for “hundreds of thousands” of capabilities. Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kittlaus said that the company’s sale to Samsung, the world’s largest maker of smartphones, was a “fast-forward option” on his ultimate goal of helping the service reach “ubiquity.”

Samsung and Viv Labs began talking seriously about an acquisition earlier this year, said Jacopo Lenzi, senior vice president at Samsung’s Global Innovation Center, which has been responsible for the recent spate of deals.