Samsung announces Bixby, new AI assistant for Galaxy S8

Move over Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, there’s a new voice-controlled artificially intelligent assistant in town: Samsung’s Bixby. Rhee said that other AI assistants support a small subset of commands available in apps.

Completeness: Bixby enabled apps will be able to hand over nearly any task the app is capable of to Bixby.

Samsung prides Bixby on three main points, context awareness, cognitive tolerance, and completeness. It is more complete in this sense because the AI assistant can do all tasks for you.

“We have thousands of software developers supporting this effort”, says Injong Rhee, vice president and head of R& at Samsung Electronics. However, Samsung said that at first, Bixby will not do too many things.

Samsung has confirmed the existence of its Bixby artificial intelligence (AI) assistant official, ahead of the imminent launch of the Galaxy S8.

In basic terms, this means that Bixby should be able to complete any command, in nearly any situation. But Bixby will be smart enough to understand commands with incomplete information and will execute the task to the best of its knowledge. We do not see many apps other than the default Samsung apps rolling out Bixby support immediately.

Rhee also said that Bixby will have its own button on the side of our next device – the Galaxy S8 – which will reduce the steps to reach to the activity you desire, such as making calls and other tasks, by pressing and uttering the command. And Samsung has plans to expand the digital helper to all their appliances like air conditioner or TVs. It also says that Bixby will understand context – it will know where you are and what you’ve been doing in a particular app and be able to respond based on that information. That means no matter when you call upon it while using an app, it will be able to pick up and take over commands by voice. It sounds a lot like Google’s Now on Tap feature which also helped users by understanding the content in any app and showed more options with related content. It will ask for help from the user only when it needed. 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.

Despite coming to the market four years after Apple and two years behind Amazon, Samsung argues that Bixby will offer a “deeper experience” than the voice assistants now on the market.