Samsung today officially announced it’s own personal assistant called Bixby. Bixby is going to be the successor of S-Voice and will be first seen on Samsung’s upcoming flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S8. It is going to be a full fledged personal assistant which will be capable of doing anything from controlling Samsung home appliances to doing payments through your voice.
Although Google Assistant, Siri or Cortana are among the leading personal assistants in the smartphone industry, Samsung claims that Bixby will offer much more functionality and deeper integration as compared to other assistants. Bixby will do it’s debut from the upcoming Galaxy S8 and later it will be introduced to Galaxy lineup smartphones as well.
Talking about it’s capability, it will offer much more features and will be much more integrated as compared to other personal assistants. Although it’s functionality will be limited in the initial stage but later it will be much more functional. User will be able to ask Bixby to look up for a specific picture from the Gallery application. Additionally, Bixby will also be able to answer and take an specific action for the calls and other similar tasks. It will also provide visual searches.
Moreover, Bixby will be able to make payments through voice commands. There will a feature called Bixby Pay for the payments tasks. Bixby will also be having third-party app integrations which will let you to perform various tasks on different apps just through voice commands.
Samsung adds that the Bixby functionality is not only limited to the smartphones but it can also work with any Samsung device which has an internet connection and a microphone. Soon after the Galaxy S8, Bixby will make it’s way to the Galaxy line-up smartphone. It will be introduced to smart appliances as well like the Smart TVs and wearables. Samsung may also introduce it to the modern appliances such as the washing machine or the microwave which will be an interesting thing to see.
According to the sources, Galaxy S8 flagships will include a button on the side edge which will launch Bixby. Though it sounds much more interesting as of now but we will have to wait for it to experience it in the real life scenarios. This is going to be one of the interesting feature of Galaxy S8 and sounds very promising as now.
Dr. Injong Rhee, Samsung’s head of research and development for software and services, says “A lot of other agents are focused on being knowledgeable, providing answers to fact-based questions, glorified extensions of search. Bixby is capable of developing a new interface to our devices, or devices that are going to host Bixby. It’s philosophically different from other agents, and it’s purpose is to change user behavior from just using touch commands.”
