Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant which have been rumoured for quite some time now has finally been confirmed by Samsung. In a press statement released yesterday, the South Korean giant has stated that Bixby ‘will be a new intelligent interface’ on future Samsung devices. The company leaked the AI-powered voice assistant last week on its official Italian website under the Privacy header.
If you are not aware, Bixby is the result of Samsung acquiring Viv last year – an intelligent personal assistant software founded by the people who actually built Apple’s Siri back then.
In the latest statement released by Samsung, InJong Rhee, Executive Vice President, Head of R&D, Software and Services have explained every bit of company’s upcoming AI-powered voice assistant. Rhee claims that – “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 (ie. touch commands).” unlike other current voice assistants which can perform an only limited number of tasks inside an app.
Further, Rhee says that users will be able to activate Bixby at any time inside a Bixby-enabled application which will allow users “to weave weave various modes of interactions including touch or voice at any context of the application, whichever they feel is most comfortable and intuitive.”
Moreover, Bixby will also handle multiple versions of same commands even after taking in fairly large amount commands. To minimise confusion, Bixby will be smart enough to understand commands with incomplete information and execute the task accordingly.
Further, Bixby-enabled devices will also come with a dedicated button for the voice-assistant for easy activation anytime.
Confirming the feature in the upcoming Galaxy S8, Rhee said – “Bixby will be our first step on a journey to completely open up new ways of interacting with your phone. At the launch of the Galaxy S8, a subset of preinstalled applications will be Bixby-enabled. This set will continue to expand over time. Our plan is to eventually release a tool (in SDK) to enable third-party developers to make their applications and services Bixby-enabled easily.”
Not only this, Samsung also confirmed that the voice assistant will gradually make its way to other Samsung manufactured appliances. Samsung said – “In the future, you would 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.”