Samsung Launches Bixby, Its Answer To Siri & Alexa

Image courtesy of Eric Hauser

Move over Siri, Cortana, and Alexa, there’s a new voice-controlled artificially intelligent assistant in town: Samsung’s Bixby.

Samsung announced Monday that its not-so-secret assistant Bixby will launch later this month, living inside the soon-to-be unveiled Galaxy S8 smartphone.

Unlike AI assistants from Apple, Google, and Alexa, Samsung says Bixby won’t just be a voice answering questions. Instead, the company claims the service is “fundamentally different,” offering a “deeper experience” by serving as a guide to customers’ phones, having the capability to support nearly all tasks that can be performed through Bixby-enabled apps.

Samsung says that new devices will feature a dedicated Bixby button on the side. The company believes this will alleviate confusion on how to activate the system.

For example, the company says in a blog post, 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.”

As for using Bixby within apps, users will be able to call on the assistant at any time. Once Bixby is activated, it will then understand the current context and state of the application and will be able to carry out the current work-in-progress continuously.

Samsung adds that over time, Bixby will be “smart enough” to understand commands with incomplete information and execute the tasks, meaning you won’t have to memorize a specific commands to use the service.

“Bixby is the heart of our software and services evolution as a company,” Samsung said, adding that the service will eventually expand to other appliances from the company, including air conditioners and televisions.

For now, the company says that when the Galaxy S8 launches it will come with several pre-installed apps that will work with Bixby.

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