Samsung officially announces Bixby, the assistant that will make the Galaxy S8 adapt to you
At this point we're just nine days away from
the grand unveiling of the Galaxy S8 and S8+. And in between leaks about the
devices, Samsung itself has decided to officially announce one of their
defining features, through the voice of InJong Rhee, Executive Vice President
and Head of R&D, Software and Services. We're talking about the Bixby
virtual assistant that will be built into the smartphones - it even gets its
own button on the left side.
Samsung says Bixby isn't like the other
virtual assistants you've known so far. Instead, it will learn and adapt to
you. It will offer a deeper experience than its competitors because of its
"proficiency" in three properties: completeness, context awareness,
and cognitive tolerance.
Completeness refers to the fact that it will
support "almost" any task that you can perform via touch inside an
app, and not just a limited subset. The caveat here is that apps need to become
"Bixby-enabled", so it won't just work out of the box with everything
you install on your brand new S8.
Context awareness means that you'll be able
to summon Bixby at any time, even while using an app, and it will know what you
were doing. It will understand your intentions and will let you "weave
various modes of interactions including touch or voice at any context of the
application".
Through its cognitive tolerance, Bixby will
be smart enough to understand your commands even if you issue them with
incomplete information. In such cases, it will first execute the task to the
best of its knowledge, and only then, if needed, will it ask you for additional
details. Samsung says this will make your interactions with the assistant much
more natural, since you won't have to remember specific commands for everything
you want it to do.
InJong Rhee, Samsung Executive Vice President and Head of R&D, Software and Services
Bixby will make your phone easier to use
overall, reducing friction and creating a more rewarding user experience. That
dedicated button for Bixby will help achieve this, since you will never wonder
how best to invoke the assistant - wherever you are, whatever you were doing,
you just press it.
The bad news is that when the Galaxy S8
launches only a subset of pre-installed applications will be Bixby-enabled.
Samsung promises that more apps will be supported in time, and the company
plans to "eventually" release a software development kit (SDK) for
third party developers to use in order to make their apps Bixby-capable. On the
other hand, Bixby will not be confined to phones - you should apparently expect
to see it gradually rolling out to all Samsung appliances.
Follow us on Twitter
Like our page on Facebook