Bixby: Move over Siri and Alexa
Samsung is fairly new in entering the realm of voice powered virtual assistant. Apple already is very successful with Siri but Samsung says that its “Bixby” agent is fundamentally different from every product available in the market. One of its features is to reduce confusion around the whereabouts of its usage. It has general knowledge on what is going in the device when asked to perform some action.
Viv is heard to be behind the Al assistant Bixby. The company also helped in creation of Siri prior to it being acquired by Apple. It was acquired by Samsung last year. An in-house version of Bixby is launching in-house this month. The company made the official announcement on Monday in a blogspot claiming that it will launch the assistant alongside Galaxy S8 this March. The blog post did lay out some of the features along with long-term intentions of expanding it in the virtual assistant horizon.
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Elaborating more on Bixby the company claims that once an app supports it the intelligent companion will get support of virtually all of the app’s features. The function is different in contrast with Crotana, Siri and Google Assistant. These Al assistants offer a limited subset of functions for any of the app’s full list features. This means that this assistant will replace text and touch based input fully for every app-eventually.
Bixby is a different approach to eliminate touch input altogether
The fundamental approach different to the ordinary Al assistant lies in the awareness of Bixby to know exactly what the user was doing before it was called on. The assistant is aware of what the user was doing on their device. It will then be able to take the work flow from there. Bixby will know how to approach forward from where the user left off in their use of the device. Since, the typical voice assistant products do not know what is happening on the touch screen. This is a very different product approach to what Samsung is aiming for with its personal assistant.
Samsung aims to take it humble with S8
Samsung takes it up with Amazon’s Alexa by making sure that Bixby is flexible enough to hear any voice commands. The assistant can handle a wide range of voice commands which means that the user does not have to memorize specific orders. In an example that it is designed to ask for more information and builds on whatever it understands in a piecemeal fashion. This means that one won’t have to give up and route your elsewhere if it cannot figure out the user commands.
Read: Bixby Al will take Samsung S8 to a new level
In Galaxy S8 there will be a physical button available to call on Bixby assistant. This approach will limit the functional friction to the point where the assistant is a physical click away. Google and Apple have shortcuts available by long press actions. Samsung is taking it up another notch b dedicating a key to the virtual assistant. In the future the company aims to expand the assistant to not only mobile device but to air conditioners, TVs and other home appliances.
All of this is very impressive, indeed. Samsung is very cautious and is looking to take modest steps in the S8 launch. We attribute this to the Note 7 fiasco that tarnished its reputation. In the launch it will only support a small subset of pre installed apps like a third party SDK planned for developers. This will able them to take on the task of enabling Bixby apps.
Image via Samsung Rumors
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