Samsung Group Unveils Context-Aware AI Assistant, Bixby

Now Samsung has officially unveiled its take on Siri and Cortana.

S8 owners will be able to summon Bixby on the phone at the press of a button.

Are you interested in the new Bixby Assitant?

And that’s what Bixby looks like right now – a bargaining chip in the game of big-brand brinksmanship, one that will enable Samsung to strike a better deal during the next round of partnership negotiations. For example, you can prompt Bixby to not only remind you to do something, but you can request Bixby to remind you to do something through a specific app, at a specific time, and then even immediately share that reminder with someone else, all without actually touching the phone.

Dr. Injong Rhee, Samsung’s head of research and development for software and services. Nearly everything that the user can do via touch, Bixby will be able to do as well. In other words, Samsung aims to offer an alternative to the device’s main UI, which can be complex and arcane, and not just a glorified search engine that returns facts based on precise questions. This device will be the first to carry Bixby with it everywhere it goes – but it won’t be the last.

The answer? A digital assistant that lets you do everything with voice commands instead of poking, swiping, and tapping at your phone. 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.

What do you think of Bixby?

For now, Samsung has not revealed what is powering the Bixby assistant.

The overarching goal, according to Rhee, is “to make the interface of the phone simpler and more natural to use”. It will always be on the mark to help users in completing a task, either by voice commands or manual taps. It was speculated that might be a camera shortcut, but Samsung’s Bixby announcement confirms it’s for the new voice assistant (although Samsung calls it an “agent”). Just tell your washing machine how you want your laundry, and you’re done.

Dr. Rhee says the thing that will unite all of these various Bixby-enabled devices is a dedicated hardware button to launch the service. In order to do this, Samsung adopted a “conceptually new philosophy to the problem”, in that as opposed to humans having to learn how the machine interacts with the world, the machine “needs to learn and adapt to us”. The S8 should also support Google Assistant if it ships with Android 7.0 as expected, “so users will have a choice between Bixby and Google Assistant”.

The first is about being able to use Bixby for anything, in any situation.

“Bixby is going to be playing catch up”, Goertz said. The company says that the roster of Bixby-ready apps will expand over time, and that third-party developers will eventually have access to it.

However, it seems applying artificial intelligence (AI) from Viv – founded Dag Kittlaus who co-founded Siri – will come in a latter iteration.

Bixby is created to offer more than other virtual assistants by becoming more proficient in three key areas.