Samsung has acquired Innoetics, a Greek text-to-speech firm.

The terms of the deal havent been disclosed – Samsung has been quiet on the acquisition as a whole – but TechCrunch reports that the price was somewhere under €40m (£36m).

Its not hard to imagine what Samsung might want with Innoetics technology.

Bixby, its voice-based virtual assistant, was developed after the $215m acquisition of Viv last October – and, according to reports last week, is currently being held back from an English-language launch due to difficulties in the translation from Korean.

Innoetics was founded in 2006, as a spin-off the Athena Research & Innovation Centre, and has offered its Speech Synthesis technmology through APIs to companies like Vodafone and Duolingo.

The company is discontinuing all current services, and will operate as an independent, wholly-owned subsidiary of Samsung, from its current office in Athens.

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