Samsung on Monday officiallyannouncedBixby, its new personal digital assistant based on AI technologies from Viv Labs, a startup by Siri co-founders Dag Kittalus and Adam Cheyer that the South Korean companyacquiredlast year. According to InJong Rhee, Executive Vice President and head of R&D, Software and Services at Samsung, Bixby is about completeness, context awareness and cognitive tolerance, aside from other features.
The personal assistant should launch alongside Galaxy S8 and will be “fundamentally different” than Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant and more.
At launch, onlyten preinstalled appswill be Bixby-enabled.
Over time, additional apps will gain Bixby compatibility as Samsung eventually releases an official software development kit for third-party developers to make their apps and services Bixby-enabled easily.
Bixby will debut on Galaxy S8, but Samsung says the feature will be gradually applied to all its appliances in one form or another. “In the future, you would be able to control your air conditioner or TV through Bixby,” wrote the company.
Like Siri, Bixby is a service that relies on the power of the cloud so network connectivity is required to interact with the assistant. The South Korean company is “fundamentally and conceptually” changing its attitude toward software and services.
“Our investment in engineering resources speaks for itself—we have thousands of software developers supporting this effort,” Rhee said.
“A lot of other agents are focused on being knowledgeable, providing answers to fact-based questions, glorified extensions of search,” he additionallytoldThe Verge. “Bixby is capable of developing a new interface to our devices, or devices that are going to host Bixby.”
Here’s Samsung’s description of key Bixby features:
Acknowledging that Bixby may take getting some time used to, Samsung opined that reduced friction and making the user experience significantly more rewarding than the existing voice interfaces will be worth the effort.
As mentioned, Bixby will launch alongside Galaxy S8 which will have a dedicated Bixby button on its side to make it feel easier and more comfortable to give commands.
“For example, instead of taking multiple steps to make a call—turning on and unlocking the phone, looking for the phone application, clicking on the contact bar to search for the person that you’re trying to call and pressing the phone icon to start dialing—you will be able to do all these steps with one push of the Bixby button and a simple command,” said Samsung.
Siri, of course, is always ready to take your input and can be invoked anytime by pressing and holding the Home button or via the “Hey Siri” hotword if that feature has been enabled in Settings. With iOS 10, Apple has introduced support for Siri in certain types of third-party apps, like ride hailing and mobile payment apps.
