Samsung is entering the voice-powered virtual assistant game a bit later than its competitors, but it says that its forthcoming “Bixby” agent will be..
Samsung is entering the voice-powered virtual assistant game a bit later than its competitors, but it says that its forthcoming “Bixby” agent will be “fundamentally different” from what’s already available, thanks to features that reduce confusion around when and where it can be used, and a general knowledge of what’s going on with your device whenever it’s called to perform some action.
Bixby has been thought to have been the product of Viv, an AI assistant created by the team that first built Siri prior to its acquisition by Apple, and acquired by Samsung last year. Samsung created the version of Bixby it’s launching later this month in-house, however. Samsung made Bixby official on Monday with a blog post announcing that it would be launching alongside the Galaxy S8 later in March, detailing some of its features and the company’s longer-term intentions with its entry in the virtual assistant battleground.
Samsung says that Bixby is different because once an app supports it, the intelligent companion will support virtually all of an app’s features and functions; this contrasts with how Cortana, Siri and Google Assistant work, as those generally offer only a limited subset of any app’s full list of features. It’s truly meant to replace text or touch-based input completely, for every app — eventually.
