Everyone has an AI assistant, Apple has Siri, Google has Assistant and Microsoft has Cortana so it was only a matter of time before Samsung revealed their own AI assistant named Bixby.
Bixby is the company’s latest attempt at smart assistant and this one hopes to be far more useful than S-Voice. According to Samsung, Bixby is “fundamentally different from other voice agents or assistants in the market.”
The company says that Bixby will offer a richer experience than existing AI assistants thanks to three key properties that it possesses:
- Completeness
When an application becomes Bixby-enabled, Bixby will be able to support almost every task that the application is capable of performing using the conventional interface (i.e. touch commands). Most existing AI assistants currently support only a few selected tasks for an application and can therefore be confusing in terms of what works or what doesn’t work by voice command.
- Context Awareness
When using a Bixby-enabled application, you’ll be able to call upon Bixby at any time and it will understand the current context and state of the application and will let you carry out the current work-in-progress continuously. Bixby will let you combine various types of interactions including touch or voice at any point of using the application, whichever you feel is most comfortable and intuitive.
- Cognitive Tolerance
When the number of supported voice commands gets larger, remembering the exact form of the voice commands can become tricky. Most AI assistants require users to state the exact commands in a set of fixed forms. Samsung says that Bixby will be smart enough to understand commands with incomplete information and execute the commanded task to the best of its knowledge, and then will prompt you to provide more information and take the execution of the task in piecemeal. This is intended to make the interface much more natural and easier to use.
Bixby can be activated by pressing the dedicated Bixby button on the side of the S8 or S8+, by accessing it from the Bixby home page (which can be found by swiping right from your S8 / S8+ home screen) or by saying Bixby.
Samsung says that at the launch of the Galaxy S8, a subset of preinstalled applications will be Bixby-enabled and that this set will continue to expand over time. The company is eventually planning to release a tool (in SDK) to enable third-party developers to make their applications and services Bixby-enabled easily, this means that in time, more apps will be able to work with the AI assistant.
Samsung isn’t intending on limiting Bixby to their smartphones, according to a statement from the company, Bixby will gradually be applied to their appliances. In the future you’ll be able to control your air conditioner or TV through Bixby. Since Bixby will be implemented in the cloud, as long as a device has an internet connection and simple circuitry to receive voice inputs, it will be able to connect with Bixby.
